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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2020 May 3.
Published in final edited form as: Tuberculosis (Edinb). 2019 May 3;116 Suppl:S89–S97. doi: 10.1016/j.tube.2019.04.015

Figure 1. The re-emerging association between TB and DM based on indexed publications.

Figure 1.

The number of “journal articles” published in English with titles containing the words “diabetes” and “tuberculosis” and indexed in PubMed between 1900 and 2017 is plotted by year. The association between TB and DM was first reported by Avicenna in the 10th century (not shown) and the comorbidity had a common place in the literature up to the first half of the 20th century. In 1921 insulin was introduced to treat DM, which appeared to reduce the prevalence of TB in these patients due improvements in glucose control. With the additional discovery of antibiotics to cure TB between the 1940s and 1970s, the literature on the comorbidity virtually disappeared. In the 1980s and 1990s the emergence of HIV took center stage in the TB literature, but in the early 2000s there was a re-emergence in publications that paralleled the contemporary DM pandemic. RIF, rifampicin; INH, isoniazid, EMB, ethambutol; PZA, pyrazinamide.