From Bird Ponds to Monsters: A History of Diabetes

By James Brown

Since well before the dawn of the common era, doctors have known about diabetes. The way in which the disease has been diagnosed and treated has changed dramatically from times when ants or urine tasting were the only way to tell if an individual was diabetic. Similarly, the treatments prescribed have become increasingly scientific as knowledge of the biological basis of the disease has grown, taking the story of diabetes therapy from bird ponds to monsters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Brown
• Release date: Oct 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301957477

James Brown

James Brown is the author of several novels including Lucky Town and Final Performance. He has received the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction writing and a Chesterfield Film Writing Fellowship from Universal/Amblin Entertainment. His writing has been featured in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Denver Quarterly and New England Review. He lives with his family in Lake Arrowhead, California.

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From Bird Ponds to Monsters: A Short History of Diabetes

James Brown

Copyright James Brown 2012

Published at Smashwords

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About the author

James Brown is a biomedical scientist based at the Aston Research Centre for Healthy Ageing at Aston University, UK. He has been an obesity and diabetes researcher since 1999 and has published numerous research articles and reviews in the field of obesity and diabetes. In 2005 he was awarded the Eli Lilley Prize for Basic Science at Diabetes UK Annual Professional Conference.

You can follow James on Twitter @JEPBresearch or like his research page on Facebook at www.facebook.com/JamesBrownResearchGroup

Acknowledgments

This e-book would not exist without the continued support and love of my wife, Samantha, and my families. Huge thanks to my friends and colleagues, without whom I would surely go insane. I also wish to thank the following people for their support throughout my career, for their guidance and their never ending help; Dr Simon Dunmore, Dr Alex Conner, Professor Cliff Bailey, Professor Helen Griffiths, and Dr Harpal Randeva.

Foreword by the author

If you have decided to purchase this e-book, there is a strong possibility that you have either been diagnosed with diabetes, you work in the field as a pharmacist, scientist, nurse or medic or that you know someone who has the disease. In recent years the explosion in the number of new cases of diabetes has led to a situation where soon we will all know somebody with diabetes. This frightening thought inelegantly highlights how important a challenge diabetes is in the 21st century.

Although diabetes is often seen as a disease of modern lifestyle, it has been a well-documented disease for thousands of years. The aim of this book is to provide a guide for interested readers into the history of diabetes, including how it has been diagnosed and treated through history. Importantly, it teaches how research (in many forms) has produced ever better understanding of the disease and more appropriate therapies. The title of the book includes bird ponds and monsters, and both have been used to treat diabetes.

I hope you enjoy this e-book, and I hope that if you have diabetes, or know someone who has, that after reading it you will be more aware of what the disease is, and how modern treatments for diabetes have been developed over thousands of years on the back of the work of many dedicated scientists and clinicians.

Chapter One

What is Diabetes?

The medical term diabetes mellitus actually describes a collection of diseases which share a similar pathology and diagnosis (there is a different type of diabetes called ‘diabetes insipidus’, but this is rare and unrelated). The basic condition necessary for diabetes to be diagnosed is for blood glucose to be elevated above what is considered to be the normal range. Glucose is one of the most important nutrients that the human body needs to function, and it is used almost constantly by many tissues in the body as a primary source of energy. Problems arise however when the level of glucose in the blood either drop too low or rise too high.

In the UK, we use a chemical term known as ‘molarity’ to describe the concentration of glucose in the blood (the term molarity essentially just tells us how many molecules of a substance there are in a solution). The normal range for blood glucose should roughly fall between 3.5 and 5.5 millimoles per litre, also written as mmol/l (in the USA, where a different measurement system is used this range is roughly 65 to 105 milligrams per decilitre, or mg/dL). As you might expect, this figure will change throughout the day, especially after you eat a meal.

This means that doctors have two basic tools in their arsenal for diagnosing diabetes, a random blood glucose test (taken at any time of day, irrespective of when you last ate) and a fasting blood glucose test (where the patient has not eaten for 8 hours prior to the blood test being performed). A doctor will make