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Diabetes mellitus is a disease that was recognized in antiquity. Polyuric states resembling diabetes mellitus were described as early as 1550 BC in the ancient Egyptian papyrus discovered by George Ebers (1). The term ‘diabetes’, which is from the Ionian Greek meaning ‘to pass through‘, was first used by Aretaeus of Cappadocia in the second century AD as a generic description of conditions causing increased urine output (2). The association of polyuria with a sweet-tasting substance in the urine was noted in the fifth to sixth century AD by two Indian physicians, Susruta and Charuka (1,2). The urine of certain polyuric patients was described as tasting like honey, sticky to the touch and attracting ants. Two forms of diabetes could be distinguished in the Indians’ descriptions: one affected older, fatter people and the other thin people who did not survive long; this strongly reminds us the present clinical description of Type 2 and Type 1 diabetes. The term diabetes mellitus, an all...

Welcome to Problem-Based Behavioral Science and Psychiatry. In this chapter, our aims are to illustrate how the problem-based learning process works so that you can apply it to the other cases in this textbook. The goals of this chapter are: 1. To provide the reader with a guided experience on “how to use this textbook” 2. To review basic principles of problem-based learning and the rationale for why this approach is used 3. To illustrate, with a sample case, the processes of (a) “Progressive disclosure” (b) Identifying facts/problems, hypotheses/differential diagnoses, additional clinical information needed, and learning issues (c) Thinking about underlying neurobiology and other physiological mechanisms to understand the signs and symptoms of a case 4. To review the more generic process of bio-psycho-social-cultural-spiritual formulation, in order to understand the various perspectives offered by patient cases Because a textbook is not the same as a patient encounter or...

Dengue fever (DF) is an old disease; the fi rst record of a clinically compatible disease being recorded in a Chinese medical encyclopaedia in 992. As the global ship- ping industry expanded in the 18th and 19th centuries, port cities grew and became more urbanized, creating ideal conditions for the principal mosquito vector, Aedes aeg ypti. Both the mosquitoes and the viruses were thus spread to new geographic areas causing major epidemics. Because dispersal was by sailing ship, however, there were long intervals (10–40 years) between epidemics. In the aftermath of World War II, rapid urbanization in Southeast Asia led to increased transmission and hyperendemicity. The fi rst major epidemics of the severe and fatal form of disease, dengue haemorrhagic fever (DHF), occurred in Southeast Asia as a direct result of this changing ecology. In the last 25 years of the 20th century, a dramatic global geographic expansion of epidemic DF/DHF occurred, facilitated by unplanned urbani...