Does gestational diabetes always go away after the pregnancy?

Does gestational diabetes always go away after the pregnancy?

Anne Peters, MD, FACP, CDE (Professor and Director of Clinical Diabetes Programs, USC Keck School of Medicine) gives expert video advice on: How is gestational diabetes treated?; Can gestational diabetes be prevented? and more...

Gestational diabetes usually goes away after the pregnancy, but can come back subsequently over the next months to years, particularly if a woman isn't able to keep their weight in a normal range or exercise. The one caveat to that, though, is that there are women who seem like they have gestational diabetes who are actually getting adult onset Type 1 diabetes. They have antibodies to their beta cells. So there is an occasional woman whose gestational diabetes -- which actually has been sort of misdiagnosed, because it's not gestational diabetes at all -- it's really diabetes that's developing and just happened to be picked up during pregnancy. And those women end up either on insulin or oral medications, depending on the kind of diabetes they have. So I see women whose diabetes doesn't go away after pregnancy, but those are the exceptions, not the rule.