Acute adrenocortical crisis and an abnormal electrocardiogram

Acute adrenocortical crisis is often the first presentation of Addison's disease. The combination of pigmentation, peripheral circulatory failure and the electrolyte abnormality usually lead to suspicion and early treatment with corticosteroids is the key to the success in such cases. Failure of response to the standard treatment should highlight the possibility of a coexisting condition. We report a case where the patient did not respond to the treatment until such a condition was recognized. </jats:p

Understanding Monitoring in the United Kingdom Context

This chapter provides an overview of the recent and current policies for assessing and monitoring pupils’ academic progress across the four countries of the UK; England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It gives examples of the uses of the data at pupil, school and system levels and discusses some of the issues associated with these uses. Finally, a family of non-statutory large-scale monitoring systems, established by the Centre for Evaluation & Monitoring (CEM) at Durham University, England, and taken up by many schools as an alternative to nationally mandated schemes are presented. The uses of the information from CEM’s systems, in contrast to the data from statutory systems, are described