Health & Pregnancy

Pregnancy: High-Normal Blood Sugar Risky

Is Metformin Safe?

There is also confusion about which blood sugar-lowering therapies are best for the treatment of gestational diabetes.

Insulin is often recommended when diet and exercise alone fail to lower blood sugar, but use of the widely prescribed diabetes drug metformin during pregnancy remains controversial.

In a separate study also reported in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, researchers compared outcomes in 751 women with gestational diabetes treated with either insulin or metformin.

Researcher Janet A. Rowan, MB, and colleagues reported no increase in complications among infants born to mothers who took metformin.

But almost half (46%) of the metformin-treated women ended up needing supplemental insulin.