Nutrition and Metabolic Adaptations in Physiological and Complicated Pregnancy: Focus on Obesity and Gestational Diabetes.

Pregnancy offers a window of opportunity to program the future health of both mothers and offspring. During gestation, women experience a series of physical and metabolic modifications and adaptations, which aim to protect the fetus development and are closely related to both pre-gestational nutritional status and gestational weight gain. Moreover, pre-gestational obesity represents a challenge of treatment, and nowadays there are new evidence as regard its management, especially the adequate weight gain.

Gestational diabetes: A link between OGTT, maternal-fetal outcomes and maternal glucose tolerance after childbirth.

Background And Aim: The relationship among distribution of pathological values at the Oral Glucose Tolerance Test (OGTT), metabolic risk factors and pregnancy outcomes in women with Gestational Diabetes (GDM), has not been clearly identified. We retrospectively compared metabolic and therapeutic parameters, maternal-fetal outcomes and post-partum OGTTs, with respect to the number and distribution of altered values of diagnostic OGTT in pregnancy. Secondly, we assessed whether insulin therapy predictive factors were identifiable.

Adipokines: A Rainbow of Proteins with Metabolic and Endocrine Functions.

Obesity represents one of the most important health problems worldwide with increasing morbidity and mortality. Widespread prevalence of this disease justifies its actual definition of a "global epidemic". Adipose tissue is nowadays considered a complex organ with lots of endocrine and metabolic functions.