Avoiding Hypos
You'll need extra calories and fluid in your daily diet to keep your milk supply and your energy level up. If you haven't seen your dietitian lately, now's the time to go in for a refresher appointment. She can help you to create a meal plan that can promote successful breastfeeding, reasonable postpartum weight loss, and good diabetes control. Not surprisingly, nursing can cause a drop in blood glucose levels. To avoid going low, have a proteinj carb snack and something to drink either before or during nursing. This is particularly important for those middle of the night feedings. Keep some quick and easy snacks on hand where you nurse, or consider setting up a minifridge with a childproof lock.
When Its Time for Menopause
The big change in your early fifties usually brings about changes in your diabetes treatment needs as well. In addition to the mood swings, the slowdown of estrogen and progesterone production can put your blood sugars on a swing of their own. In fact, you may actually start experiencing these symptoms well before menopause, in the preceding period known as perimenopause, which starts anywhere from age forty five to fifty five C average age being forty seven).
Row Menopause Affects Diabetes
Lower estrogen levels may increase insulin resistance in type 2 women, while lower progesterone levels have the opposite effect, increasing insulin sensitivity. For this reason, one woman's glycemic (or blood sugar) response to menopause can be very different from another's. The best way to figure out what's going on with you is to test your glucose levels frequently and work closely with your doctor. On average, the ADA reports that most women require less medication for type 2 diabetes after menopause. However, weight gain, which occurs in response to a slowing metabolism and declining estrogen levels, may offset this benefit, as can inactivity. According to the Mayo Clinic, women with diabetes who are postmenopausal have a risk of heart attack or stroke that is three times that of their peers without diabetes.
RRT Risks Versus Benefits
Whether or not to take hormone replacement therapy to combat some of the menopausal problems unique to women with diabetes is very much an individual decision, based on your own medical situation and cardiovascular risk profile. Oral estrogen therapy may improve your cholesterol profile by lowering your LDL (bad) and raising your HDL (good) cholesterol, but it has also been found to increase triglyceride levels, which ups cardiovascular risk. In fact, preliminary data released in 2002 from the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) trial found that HRT estrogen/ progestin therapy increased the risk of breast cancer, pulmonary embolism, and cardiovascular disease in postmenopausal women. The jury is still out on whether estrogen therapy alone carries similar health risks.