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Darwinian medicine looks at the ecological and evolutionary roots of disease. A disease is an interaction between a genome and its biotic or abiotic environment and therefore a disease is essentially an ecological process. Good understanding of ecology and a Darwinian way of thinking can give us novel and useful perspectives on health and disease. If we understand the disease process better, we can certainly prevent, control as well as treat diseases in a better way. Although the thought that the origins of obesity and type 2 diabetes (T2D) might lie in our hunter gatherer adaptations is not new, research over the last decade makes us rethink many of the classical concepts. Brain and behavior is increasingly being recognized as central to all the endocrine, metabolic and immunological changes that earmark type 2 diabetes and other metabolic syndrome disorders. A major change in paradigm appears to be on the horizon and the proposed book intends to speed up the paradigm shift by raising important questions, pointing out flaws and inadequacies in the prevalent paradigm and stimulating radical rethinking which would redirect and refine the line of research as well as bring some fundamental changes in drug discovery and clinical practice.
List of contents
1. A Darwinian Way of Thinking.- 2. Diabetes in a Textbook.- 3. Diabetes in an Undergraduate Class.- 4. The Rise and Fall of Thrift.- 5. Of Hawks and Doves.- 6. Of Soldiers and Diplomats.- 7. The Physiology of Aggression.- 8. Deploying the Immunological Garrison.- 9. Why Population Density Matters.- 10. Time to Give up Stress.- 11. Fat: Beyond Energy Storage.- 12. Why Blood Sugar Goes up.- 13. Beating Around the 'Wrong' Bush?.- 14. Behavioral Deficiencies and Behavioral Supplementation:.- 15. Where do we Go From Here?.- Appendix I. Genes/molecules that are associated with aggression and also associated with some component of metabolic syndrome.- Appendix II. Network model of type 2 diabetes.- Appendix III. Model for the Effect of population density on aggression.- Appendix IV. Glucose homeostasis model.
Summary
Darwinian medicine looks at the ecological and evolutionary roots of disease. A disease is an interaction between a genome and its biotic or abiotic environment and therefore a disease is essentially an ecological process. Good understanding of ecology and a Darwinian way of thinking can give us novel and useful perspectives on health and disease. If we understand the disease process better, we can certainly prevent, control as well as treat diseases in a better way. Although the thought that the origins of obesity and type 2 diabetes (T2D) might lie in our hunter gatherer adaptations is not new, research over the last decade makes us rethink many of the classical concepts. Brain and behavior is increasingly being recognized as central to all the endocrine, metabolic and immunological changes that earmark type 2 diabetes and other metabolic syndrome disorders. A major change in paradigm appears to be on the horizon and the proposed book intends to speed up the paradigm shift by raising important questions, pointing out flaws and inadequacies in the prevalent paradigm and stimulating radical rethinking which would redirect and refine the line of research as well as bring some fundamental changes in drug discovery and clinical practice.
