The Prediabetic Syndrome. Large Babies and the (Pre)diabetic Father*

MANY women destined to have diabetes divulge their fate by producing infants which are large (1–10), or dead (1–5, 11–16). The high rates of fetal loss and the production of large babies are exemplified by the pregnancies of prediabetic women in the Cape Town region of South Africa. The methods used for collecting the data and the detailed results of this study have been described elsewhere (5). Suffice it to say that 62 per cent of women in the years before they became diabetic claimed to have produced at least one child weighing over 10 pounds, compared with only 12 per cent of normal control mothers. This is further shown in Table 1, in which the first and last horizontal rows contrast the babies of prediabetic with those of control mothers. The much greater incidence of large babies and of late fetal death in the prediabetics’ babies leads us in the Cape to suspect diabetes strongly from such an obstetrical history.