When insulin was initially discovered by Banting and Best in 1922, it was hailed as a cure for type 1 diabetes. Given the ability of insulin to reverse ketoacidosis and severe hyperglycemia, who could doubt that the ravages of type 1 diabetes would be relegated to the archives of medical history? However, within a few short decades of insulin's discovery, it became apparent that the short-term mortality associated with type 1 diabetes was being replaced by longer term morbidities related to renal failure, blindness, nerve damage and vascular disease. The “cure” had treated the short-term sequelae related to the metabolic derangements of insulin deficiency but unfortunately had not (in its initial use) affected the longer-term consequences of hyperglycemia.
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-- Stuart R. Chipkin, MD, Robert J. Goldberg, PhD
This article was originally published in the March 2009 issue of The American Journal of Medicine.
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