ABSTRACT
For more than a century, it has been known that diabetes antedating pregnancy can have severe adverse effects on fetal and neonatal outcomes. As early as in the 1940s, it was recognized that women who developed diabetes years after pregnancy had experienced abnormally high fetal and neonatal mortality. By the 1950s the term “gestational diabetes” was applied to what was thought to be a transient condition that affected fetal outcomes adversely, and then abated after delivery. In the 1960s, O’Sullivan found that the degree of glucose intolerance during pregnancy was related to the risk of developing diabetes after pregnancy.
