Lxxii. the Effects of Vitamin-deficient Diets on the Adrenaline Equilibrium in the Body. by Louis Gross

IN 1919 McCarrison [1919] found that certain vitamin-deficient and otherwise unbalanced diets produced a marked increase in the size of the adrenal gland, which increase was associated with a larger store of adrenaline in the case of vitamin B deficiency. In fact he was at first inclined to believe that the appearance of oedema in the wet form of beriberi was to a large extent due to increased intracapillary pressure following on an increased output of adrenaline. In 1914 Funk and v. Schonborn [1914] found an increase in the blood sugar of pigeons fed on polished rice and in 1920 Funk [1920] suggested that it was due to increased adrenaline output. Anrepl observed in one or two cats which had been fed for a considerable time on vitamin B-deficient food that the blood-pressure was approximately 285 mm. Hg. while the animals were under anaesthesia. I have shown elsewhere2 that deprivation of vitamin B from the diet of the adult rat leads almost at once to a pronounced intestinal stasis. These observations as well as the fact that adrenaline is a powerful gut inhibitor and that rats under advanced vitamin B deficiency show a number of signs resembling to some extent the effect of an increase in a sympathomimetic substance (e.g. nervousness, excitability, hair standing on end, etc.) made it seem very possible to me that the whole complex could be explained on a basis of hyperadrenalinemia [Gross, 1922]. Upon such a supposition, too, an explanation was afforded for the accumulation of large pigmentbearing cells confined to the subepithelial stroma of the colon which Keith [1914] described as occurring in advanced stasis in the human. For, granted that this pigment was taken in by phagocytes, or in some way obtained from the colon, (probably as a result of breaking down of aromatic decomposition