Note on the Distribution of Blood Sugar

A recent paper by Folin and Svedberg (1) introduces new perplexit,ies in the problem of the distribution of blood sugar between corpuscles and plasma. Until recently the view that the concentration of sugar in corpuscles and in plasma is nearly the same found general acceptance. Expressed in a convenient term this means that the ratio of distribution, corpuscle sugar: plasma sugar, is about unity. In 1928 the writer, prompted by his observation that the amount of non-sugar substances which reduce alkaline copper solutions is about 5 times as much in corpuscles as in plasma (2), studied the problem with the determination of true sugar values, and reported that the corpuscles contain relatively less sugar than the plasma. The distribution ratios, observed on thirty-six healthy subjects, gave the average of 77: 100 (3). Ege and Roche in 1930 fully corroborated these results, finding an average ratio of 80: 100 (4). Folin and Svedberg now report the substantially lower ratio of 6O:lOO for healthy persons. The divergencies are even more striking in regard to the blood of diabetic subjects. Investigators prior to 1928 contended that the distribution ratio is distinctly lower in diabetic than nondiabetic cases. (This was then accepted as “the fundamental fact” in the structure of various theories advanced by Loewi and his collaborators, by Falta and others in attempts to throw light upon the nature of diabetes mellitus.) Diametrically opposed to this stands the report of Folin and Svedberg (1) to the effect that the corpuscles in the blood of diabetics contain relatively more sugar than in the blood of non-diabetic subjects. Both of these views are in sharp contrast to our own experimental evidence reported in 1928, showing that the relative sugar content of corpuscles in diabetic and non-diabetic cases is the same. The aver-