Diabetes insipidus following closed head injury

Diabetes insipidus is a rare disease and it is a very uncommon sequel of head injury. Fitz (1914) found that the incidence of the disease attributable to any cause was fourteen cases per hundred thousand admissions to a general hospital, and Rowntree (1924) found thirteen cases per hundred thousand admissions to the Mayo Clinic. Rabino-witch (1921) found one case of diabetes insipidus* among fifty thousand admissions to a general hospital. In only two of fifty-six cases reported by Rowntree- (1924) and two, or possibly three, of forty-two cases reported by Jones (1944) was the diabetes insipidus due to head injury. Rand and Patterson (1937) have stressed the rarity of post-traumatic diabetes insipidus by stating that no case occurred in one hundred and fifty thousand admissions to a neurosurgical unit. Kahler (1886) reported twenty-six cases of diabetes insipidus following head injury, and Rand and Patterson (1937) recorded six cases; the majority of reports on the clinical features of the condition, however, have been based on one or two cases. Fink (1928), Turner (1928), and Warkany and Mitchell (1939) have reviewed the literature