I have a group I run on Babycenter.com for women who are pregnant and have diabetes/gestational diabetes. I started the group when I became pg as a way to connect with other women going through the same thing as me. The group is still active. Anyways there is a woman who posted on there that there is a lot of new research saying that it is not good for anyone with diabetes have their "Normal" blood sugars at 140, that the new research is showing that keeping it around 140 is causing nerve damage.
I have looked on line to see if I could find anything thing about this and nothing is coming up. Also I would think that if this was the case my own Endo would have called and told me to lower my BS to below 120 after meals. Just so you know I am not pregnant and this woman said this is for those who are not pregnant as well.
So I am wondering if anyone here has heard anything about this and how all diabetic now need to keep their BS below 120 after meals? Being that I run this group, I don't want to give out false information and have anyone suffer from it, but I also want to make sure information others are posting is correct as well and does not harm anyone.
Thanks for any insight.
A good source of current guidelines is put out by the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE). This guideline says:
Outpatient Glucose Targets for Pregnant Women
• R17. For women with GDM, treatment goals are a preprandial glucose concentration of 95 mg/dL or lower and either a 1-hour postmeal glucose value of 140 mg/dL or less or a 2-hour postmeal glucose value of 120 mg/dL or less
Non-diabetic pregnant women actually run a bit lower (60-70 mg/dl as opposed to 83 mg/dl) and doctors seek tighter control as even modestly increased blood sugars can affect the baby.
This is a subject of constant debate throughout the diabetes community, and you can find people with carefully considered opinions that span the entire spectrum. My own personal take on this is that flatter is always better, and 120 is the number I use as my guideline. But you'll get as many different viewpoints on this as there are people, I'm afraid.
And, of course, everyone's physiology responds individually. What's right for me might not work at all for someone else. The goal, always, is to keep spikes to an absolute minimum while not incurring serious lows. That is achievable at different numbers for different people. As always, you need to determine empirically what works for you.
