Brittle diabetes.

Brittle diabetes.

Course of brittle diabetes: 12 year follow up.

OBJECTIVE To determine the course of brittle diabetes. DESIGN 12 year follow up of patients identified in 1977-9 as having brittle diabetes; retrospective review of the case notes. SETTING Nottingham health district. SUBJECTS 25 brittle diabetic patients were identified in 1979-9; 11 (five men) had three or more admissions with ketoacidosis between June 1977 and 1979 and 14 (eight men) ha...

Long-term continuous intraperitoneal insulin treatment in brittle diabetes.

Attempts to achieve a fair metabolic equilibrium in a young woman with brittle diabetes by continuous subcutaneous, intramuscular, and continuous intravenous administration of insulin were unsuccessful. Continuous intraperitoneal administration of insulin through a permanently inserted polyethylene catheter connected to an open-loop peristaltic pump led to an appreciable improvement in mean blo...

Brittle asthma.

Brittle asthma is a rare form of severe asthma characterized by a wide variation of Peak Expiratory Flow (PEF), in spite of heavy doses of steroides. Brittle asthmatic patients had very serious and often, life threatening, attacks. Type 1 brittle asthma is characterized by a mantained PEF variability despite therapy, and it affected mostly female, aged between 15 and 55 years. Type 1 is associa...

Usefulness of measuring the gastric emptying time in a case of brittle diabetes.

Gastric emptying time measurement by radionuclide study, although quite informative, is rarely remembered in clinical practice. We presented a patient with brittle diabetes who had multiple emergency admissions due to hypoglycemia under routinely prescribed insulin therapy. She had severe gastroparesis, which was determined by scintigraphic gastric emptying study (gastric half-emptying time = 2...