Background: Women with prior gestational diabetes (GDM) are at elevated risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. We sought to compare cardiometabolic risk factors among parous U.S. women ages 20 to 44 by history of GDM.

Methods: We used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from 2007-2016. We included 3562 parous women. We compared anthropometric measures, glycemic markers, blood pressure and lipids by self-reported history of GDM, both with and without adjusting for demographic and behavioral factors and waist circumference. Analyses took NHANES multi-stage survey design into account.

Results: Women without history of GDM were younger and, in crude analyses, had more favorable cardiometabolic risk factor profile than women with history of GDM (Table). Similar patterns were observed after adjusting for age, race/ethnicity, education and smoking. After also adjusting for waist circumference, only hemoglobin A1c, fasting glucose, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol were significantly higher among women with history of GDM compared to women without GDM.

Conclusions: Among parous U.S. women ages 20 to 44, those with a history of GDM had less favorable cardiometabolic risk factor profiles than did women without GDM, though results were attenuated after adjusting for markers of demographics, behavior, and central obesity.

Disclosure

K.S. Dorans: None. L.A. Bazzano: None. J. He: None.

Funding

Tulane Center of Biomedical Research (P20GM109036)

Readers may use this article as long as the work is properly cited, the use is educational and not for profit, and the work is not altered. More information is available at http://www.diabetesjournals.org/content/license.