A History of Diabetes in Pregnancy The impact of maternal diabetes o
Type 1 diabetes is a serious and common disease, afflicting one per 200 of the population worldwide. It is widely believed to cause harmful physical maldevelopment--congenital malformations--and other consequences in the unborn children of women with the
- PDF / 1,737,288 Bytes
- 274 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 57 Downloads / 157 Views
Harold Kalter
A History of Diabetes in Pregnancy The Impact of Maternal Diabetes on Offspring Prenatal Development and Survival
1 3
Dr. Harold Kalter Ring House, Apt 432 E. Jefferson Street 1801 20852 Rockville Maryland USA [email protected]
ISBN 978-94-007-1556-1 e-ISBN 978-94-007-1557-8 DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-1557-8 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2011932789 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Preface
A happy chance led to my interest in the subject of this book, an invitation out of the blue from the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine to write a review of the causes of congenital malformations in human beings as they were then known. Years earlier Josef Warkany, a pioneer in the field of teratology, and I had reviewed the same subject in the same journal (Warkany and Kalter 1961), and feeling it would lead to a stronger statement I asked him to join me in its writing. The work that emerged rested on a critical reading and analysis of the biomedical literature of the previous several decades that dealt with congenital malformations and their causes, known and supposed (Kalter and Warkany 1983). These primary sources–reports of individual cases, hospital series, population surveys, vital statistics, and the like–contained many suspicions and allegations as well as some clear evidence about the origins of these abnormalities. Our task was to consider this body of evidence and come to an assessment of them for the purpose of estimating the likelihood of preventing such conditions. The causes had earlier been broadly categorized into genic, chromosomal, environmental, and complex or unknown. About the first two generally there was little theoretical that was not settled, but about the others there was little that was certain. Thus the environmental origins of congenital malformations would get most of our attention, especially as that was where the controversies lay. A considerable number of such agents had been found to be teratogenic in laboratory animals. But no more than a handful had been unquestionably identified as having caused congenital malformations in human beings. These were ionizing radiation, already identified by the 1920s; the rubella virus, revealed in 1941; later some other infectious agents; and afterward several therapeutic substances, environmental contaminants, and a miscellany of others–cytotoxic, anticoagulant, and anticonvulsant drugs, thalidomide, organic mercury, and so forth. In addition some noninfectious ma
Data Loading...
