13The Diabetes Care Gap Most Women Never Hear About7 min read

Pregnancy Planning Gets the Least Attention

For women with diabetes who are considering pregnancy, preconception counseling is especially important. Blood sugar control before and during pregnancy significantly affects outcomes for both mother and child. Yet the data shows that fertility and prepregnancy counseling rates among women with diabetes were low across studies — and in some cases, as low as 1 percent. There wasn’t enough comparative data to measure the gap against women without diabetes clearly, but the raw numbers alone are striking. Women who go into pregnancy without this counseling miss a window where proactive steps could reduce the risk of complications considerably. The researchers noted this as one of the most concerning findings in the review.

More Doctor Visits Don’t Automatically Mean Better Coverage

One of the counterintuitive aspects of this research is that higher healthcare utilization didn’t protect women from these gaps. Women with diabetes often have more contact with the medical system than their peers — more appointments, more lab work, more specialist involvement. Yet those touchpoints weren’t translating into comprehensive preventive care. As Lauren Wisk, PhD, the study’s senior author and an associate professor at UCLA Health, noted, the issue isn’t frequency of visits. It’s what happens during those visits and whether anyone takes responsibility for the full picture of a patient’s health. A system oriented around one condition can miss everything adjacent to it.