All pregnant women should be tested for gestational diabetes between their 24th and 28th weeks of pregnancy. Risk Factors Genetics. It tends to run in families. Because it increases insulin resistance. Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, and African Americans are at increased risk, presumably because compared with whites and Asians, they are more likely to be overweight.
Pregnant women produce various hormones essential to the baby's growth.
However these hormones may also make the mother insulin resistant. All pregnant women have some degree of insulin resistance. But if this resistance becomes full-blown gestational diabetes, it usually appears around the 24th week of pregnancy. That is why all pregnant women should be screened for gestational diabetes around that time. Because both gestational and type II diabetes develop due to insulin resistance, researchers suspect that these two conditions have a similar genetic basis.