Is Metformin safe during pregnancy?

Have you been concerned with the rising numbers of women that are getting gestational diabetes?  Have you been worried about getting it while you yourself are pregnant? If you do not know the numbers’ let me tell you. Gestational Diabetes affects around 2 in 5 of every woman getting pregnant. Those numbers jump way up if you are of an ethnic minority group.  What if I told you there is a pill you can take that will reduce that number to 3 in a 100 for the average woman.  Well, there is and its name is Metformin and pregnancy is just one area it has been shown to help in. 
Metformin has been shown to reduce levels of glucose, testosterone and insulin in the women that take it.  The reduction in these levels have many benefits for women in general, including but not limited to; weight loss, increased fertility, and reduction of absorption of carbohydrates.   Acne reduction is a benefit of reduced testosterone.  This is an added benefit I know most women will gladly take advantage of.  My wife doesn’t even want to leave the house if she gets one new pesky zit, so if she had known there was something that could prevent that then she would have taken it just for that benefit. 
With the rising cases of gestational diabetes I want to encourage you to consider all your options when it comes to having a baby.  Gestational diabetes can be very serious condition. The size of your baby can drastically increase with this condition. This may mean you would not have the option of a natural birth, but be forced to do a caesarean section.  Prevention is the best choice if you want to have all options open for you and your family. Metformin can do that for you; it will leave all options on the table. 
If you are thinking about having a baby and are concerned with the possibility of gestational diabetes it would be a good idea to discuss your options with your doctor, including metformin. If you are of an ethnic minority I urge you to have this discussion with your doctor. You are at a much greater risk than other women. Overweight women are also at a higher risk of contracting gestational diabetes during pregnancy. There have been some medicines with metformin that have been used with rosiglitazone and have been on the watch list for physicians due to its cardiovascular risk. Make sure to try your treatment with the metformin medicines without rosiglitazone to ensure your safety from its side effects.  Metformin is not to treat type 1 diabetes, the one that you are born with and is a non-production of insulin disease. I want to end by encouraging women in the high risk categories to again have that discussion with your doctor about options of prevention.