Female Awareness about Gestational Diabetes and its Health Risk Effect on Pregnancy Outcome among Women in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Uncontrolled gestational diabetes mellitus causes severe maternal and fetal complications such as pre-eclampsia, macrosomic baby, fetal demise, neonatal hyperbilirubinemia, and hypoglycemia and also increases obesity and type 2 DM risk in offspring later in life. This study aimed to assess awareness of women in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia regarding diabetes and its health risk effect on pregnancy outcome and to measure the prevalence of gestational DM among them. This is a comparative cross-sectional descriptive study conducted in Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Faculty of Medicine Umm Al Qura University involving 480 women living in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia during June 2021-June 2022. Data was collected through an online questionnaire formulated to survey saudi women due to covid 19 pandemics measures. About 20% had DM. Prevalence of gestational DM was 11.5% among currently pregnant participants. 76% of participants had family history of diabetes. After doing linear regression of predictors for knowledge about gestational DM, gravidity and parity became non-significant, however being in medical field, husband in medical field, having DM, past or family history of DM remained significant (p<0.001, 0.045, <0.001, 0.002 and 0.006 respectively). The highest predictor is being in medical field (B =7.218), followed by having DM (B =2.697), followed by husband in medical field (B =2.159), past history of DM (B =1.945), then family history of DM (B =1.727). Health care efforts and interventions are required to increase the awareness especially about the importance of screening for gestational DM due to the bad sequences of gestational DM.

Is Contraception Usage Affected During Corona Virus Disease 2019 Pandemic Among Women in Saudi Arabia?

Background: Contraception has many benefits beside improvimg women health such as increasing child survival and improving perinatal outcomes due to interpregnancy interval regulation. Objectives: to assess the knowledge and attitude of Saudi women regarding the use of contraceptives, to measure the prevalence of contraception use, and to highlight factors affecting the use of contraception among women in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia during covid 19 pandemic.Methods: This is a comparative cross-sectional descriptive study involving 432 saudi arabian women during the period from July 2021 to July 2022. Data was collected through an online questionnaire formulated to survey saudi women due to covid 19 pandemics measures.Results: Overall knowledge was good among 48% of participants. Regarding attitude towards contraception use. About 77.8% agreed to use contraception while only 3% disagreed. 90.7% had an experience with contraceptive methods either currently or previously. Coitus interruption was the commonest method used by about 20%, followed by COC (18%), then condom (12.5%). Predictors for higher use were husband higher education, gravidity of two to four and previous one to two cesarean section (AOR=10.048,283,20.047 respectively).Conclusion: Participants had good contraceptive knowledge and positive attitude towards contraception use. Proportion of contraceptive methods use was high among participants. We recommend more health education campaigns about the importance of contraception especially during the COVID 19 pandemic and among women who had previous cesarean section. We also recommend more research involving a representative sample from all regions of the kingdom.