does anyone know what’s most important: a good average or all the individual numbers that create that average? say i have a1c of 5.8% during my pregnancy (which is a great average to have while carrying a child), but i get a few fluctuating highs and lows mixed in to the readings that give me that average. is it more important for an overall good a1c or do those occasional swings affect the baby badly?
My endo says that your range is far more important than your average for the baby. She has me watching my standard deviation more closely than my a1c. Everything I’ve read says that that, in the first trimester, a single significant high could redirect your body’s resources for your needs and starve the fetus of the oxygen its needing during crucial spine and brain development. That’s terrifying.
Here’s a post from the Mayo Clinic and an April 2008 article from Diabetes Health (that I think first appeared in US News and World Report).