Abstract
On the occasion of the Third Aberdeen International Colloquium on Carbohydrate Metabolism in Pregnancy and the Newborn in 1983, I was assigned the task of summarizing the meeting and projecting future directions in this important area of scientific inquiry and medical practice. My meagre efforts at crystal ball gazing appeared in the proceedings of that notable meeting (Skyler 1984). For the Fourth Aberdeen International Colloquium on Carbohydrate Metabolism in Pregnancy and the Newborn in 1988, my assignment was to identify those areas of consensus in management strategy, and those areas in which controversy remains. The task was made somewhat easier by the appearance in the month before the Colloquium of the first full report of the US Diabetes in Early Pregnancy Study in the New England Journal of Medicine (Mills et al. 1988). It is not that the participants necessarily needed this trigger to engender controversy. This was a vocal enough group in its own right. Nonetheless, this controversial report focused the debate rather sharply on at least the issue of congenital malformations.