Type 2 diabetes

In the space of a few months in 1921, an acute and terminal disease—type 1 diabetes—became a manageable chronic condition. The discovery of insulin by Frederick Banting, Charles Best, and their colleagues captured a mood of therapeutic optimism, the hope that a new scientific medicine, rooted in the laboratory and working through the networks of industry and state health care, could find cures for all diseases. But insulin therapy, clinicians soon realised, was effective in only a minority of patients. The remainder had what since the mid-1970s has been called type 2 diabetes—a disease that has come to represent another face of modern medicine: complex chronic diseases associated with the social, commercial, and obesogenic environments of industrial and post-industrial nations. In appreciation of the peer-review heroes from 2015The Lancet is responding to the increased volume of high quality research by not only expanding the number of specialty journals within our family, but also by publishing more research studies. In 2015, we published almost 20% more research papers than in the previous year. And we did this more quickly, by offering the possibility of 10 + 10 rapid publication for randomised controlled trials sent for peer review. We also launched The Lancet Clinic, published highly clinical and global health Commissions, and Series on topics as diverse as radiation and religion. Full-Text PDF Acute myocardial infarction“You need a heart before you can have an attack”, growls the gumshoe Eddie Valiant in the 1988 cartoon-noir Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Valiant has a point, and not just the obvious one: our contemporary concept of an acute myocardial infarction (AMI) makes little sense outside a series of historical frames in which we have come to understand the function of the heart, the connection between symptoms and underlying pathologies, and the tensions between abstract analyses of risk and the experience of a heart attack. Full-Text PDF