At risk women of gestational diabetes now have access to a new service to assist them with the condition.
Up to 18 percent of women in Mexico will contract gestational diabetes during their pregnancies, and a new mhealth program has now been released to provide those women with assistance and education about the condition.
This new health care effort is uses basic text messaging technology to help spread awareness.
It is a combined effort between the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation and Project HOPE. They have come up with an mhealth program that will educate women living in Mexico City about gestational diabetes as a condition, and what it can mean to them. This illness is a type of high blood sugar level condition that occurs during pregnancy.
The mhealth program helps to provide both education and management information to high risk women.
The program has been labeled “Using Mobile Technology for Diabetes Management Among High Risk Mothers in Mexico.” It functions by sending educational text messages that offer suggestions to help to prevent the condition as well as to treat it when it has already been diagnosed. The hope is to be able to use this mhealth effort to educate an estimated 1,000 mothers in the lowest income bracket.
According to the Project HOPE senior advisor for non-communicable diseases, Paul Madden, in a statement about the mhealth program, “With mobile phones literally at the fingertips of many pregnant women and new moms at risk of gestational diabetes, they are a powerful tool for teaching women how to avoid and care for the illness.”
At the moment, up to 18 percent of Mexican mothers are affected by this condition. Among them, 30 to 60 percent of them will go on to develop type 2 diabetes within 5 years to a decade following the pregnancy. This program is based on the recent research that is indicating that women within the Latina population are at a notably higher risk of the condition than those who are not. It has been suggested that this is likely a genetic susceptibility. The reason that this has been suggested is that even when a Hispanic woman is of normal age and weight during pregnancy, the risk is still higher than it is among women who aren’t of that genetic background.
