Dietary supplementation for gestational diabetes prevention and management: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

Purpose The use of supplement to prevent and ease gestational diabetes (GDM) progression has been examined in various studies, but the results were inconclusive, and studies evaluated dietary supplements separately. The present review aimed to evaluate the efficacy of various dietary supplementation on GDM risk and the surrogate markers for cardiometabolic risk of pregnant women with GDM. Methods A comprehensive search on multiple databases were performed to identify randomized controlled trials. Random-effects model was used to pool the results in relative risk (RR) or mean difference. Results Fifty-three randomized controlled studies with 9443 pregnant women were included. Vitamin D (5 studies, RR 0.64; 95% CI 0.44, 0.94) and myo-inositol (4 studies, RR 0.34, 95% CI 0.20, 0.58) supplementation significantly reduced the risk of GDM. Myo-inositol, probiotics, and vitamin D showed significant intervention effect on surrogate markers related to glycemic control, lipid profile, inflammatory, and oxidative stress. However, the majority of included studies were clustered to Iran and Italy, which might convey a generalizability bias. Conclusion Dietary supplementation including vitamin D and myoinositol supplementation has the potential in primary prevention and management of GDM, whereas probiotics demonstrated its ability in GDM management by improving the levels of surrogate markers for cardiometabolic risk. The potential for dietary supplement in preventing GDM or managing cardiometabolic risk of pregnant women should receive more attentions.