ABSTRACT
Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is defined as an impairment of glucose tolerance first recognized at the index pregnancy. Autoimmune diabetes is caused by the destruction of β-cells of pancreatic islets by an immune-mediated process, promoted by the interaction of genetic and environmental factors. A minority of patients with type 1 diabetes mellitus (DM-1) have no known etiology and no evidence of autoimmunity; most of these patients are of African or Asian origin. If immunotherapy becomes a reality for autoimmune diabetes, the investigation of both patients with latent autoimmune diabetes (AIGDM) of adulthood and women with autoimmune GDM will be of great importance to identify subjects at high risk for T1DM who might benefit from immune intervention. Freinkel et al. foresaw the evolution of what may be defined as AIGDM, when they wrote in 1987, that GDM entails genotypic and phenotypic diversity and may include patients with slowly evolving DM-1.
