A new study has found that the risk of gestational diabetes is reduced if pregnant women dim the lights at home during the evening and turn off or dim their screens and other devices a few hours before bedtime.
Light exposure in the three hours before sleep onset was higher among women who developed gestational diabetes mellitus in the multi-site study. They were not different from those who did not develop it in terms of how much time they spent in the dark or how active they were during the day.
The results of the study were published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology Maternal Fetal Medicine on March 10. Dr. Minjee Kim, an assistant professor of neurology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and neurologist with Northwestern Medicine, was the lead author.
Study investigates risk of gestational diabetes
Gestational diabetes is rising at an alarming rate in the United States and around the world.
This type of diabetes affected about 4.5% of first-time mothers with babies born between 2011 and 2013, and its prevalence is expected to rise by an average of 3.4% every three years through 2019. In 2020, 7.8% of all U.S. pregnancies were complicated by diabetes.