The Malaysian GestatiOnal Diabetes and prevention of DiabtES Study (MY GODDESS)

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Gestational diabetes is a condition that occurs during pregnancy when the blood sugar is higher than it should be. After the baby is born, the blood sugar returns to normal. The number of women in Malaysia that develop gestational diabetes is about 50,000 each year and these numbers are increasing with the worldwide epidemic of obesity. Around half od the women with gestational diabetes are likely to develop either type 2 diabetes or pre diabetes within 10 years. In other words, these women who are child-rearing and who may also be working outside the home, are developing diabetes in their 30s and 40s, almost 20 years before the average person. Gestational diabetes leads to further health problems and the baby can be born big-for-dates which increases his/her chances of developing type 2 diabetes later in life. Malays, Indian and Chinese Malaysians are all at high risk for getting diabetes.The chances of getting type 2 diabetes could be significantly reduced if women made lifestyle changes to lose weight and increase their physical activity. This can be very difficult with modern lifesyles and demands. Also getting gestational diabetes is usually a very upsetting experience because the mother feels guilty and also worrying about the health of her baby. There have been trials, mainly in North America, testing different types of lifestlyes but the findings from these trials are not clear cut. There have been no trials reported in Malaysia. We still do not know what kind of support women would find the most helpful.King's Health Partners has one of the largest clinical and research units for diabetes. We have been developing new approaches to supporting women with gestational diabetes (led by Prof Angus Forbes and Pro Helen Murphy). Our interviews with women with gestational diabetes showed that women in the UK have a poor understanding of their risk of developing diabetes and we think this might be the same for women in Malaysia. They also did not know how best to lower their risk and worried that exercise and different diet might harm their baby. We also found that women became very upset, guilty and burdened after they were told they had gestational diabetes. This project is called MY GODDESS and we aim to share the ideas and experiences of women in the UK and Malaysia. In the first set of studies, we will review the research already published and find out what works and what doesn't. We will focus on studies that uses digital technology such as apps, websites from the smartphone or computer. We will then interview women with a history of gestational diabetes and ask what was difficult about making lifestyle changes and what helped. We will then use use our shared knowledge as researchers and as patients to design a new treatment to support lifestyle change. We will consider ideas such as group sessions, lifestyle coaches text messages, and wearing devices that measure our step counts and heart rate. We will develop the MY GODDESS app which can be downloaded onto a smartphone. We believe that if we understand better how to harness the 'health power' in digital technology, we will produce stronger support systems to help women with GDM lead healthier lifestyles. The second project is to test our new treatment, MY GODDESS, in a small study to see if we could test our new could be conducted at a largerthat it does help women to make lifestyle changes. We will recruit about 50 patients. We will study how many women we could identify, who will be interested in participating and who will stay in the treatment to the end. We will ask women for feedback about their experience, what worked and what did not and any suggestions about improvement.By the end of the project if our findings are in the right direction, we will submit a proposal to conduct a full scale trial to test whether MY GODDESS works in a much larger sample of women across Malaysia.