The blood picture in the guinea-pig in acute and chronic scurvy.

For many years anaemia has been considered to be part of the syndrome of scurvy. Various investigators have reported finding anaemia in vitamin C deficiency, both in human beings (Parsons & Smallwood, 1935 ; Jennings & Glazebrook, 1938; Vilter & Woolford, 1945 ; Vilter, Woolford & Spies, 1946; Israels, 1943 ; Bronte-Stewart, 1953) and in guinea-pigs (Mettier & Chew, 1932; Aron, 1939; Sigal, 1939; Desmarais 8L. McCraw, 1956). Some workers claimed that the anaemia in human subjects could be corrected by the administration of vitamin C (Jennings & Glazebrook, 1938; Vilter & Woolford, 1945; Vilter et al. 1946; Bronte-Stewart, 1953; Israels, 1943), but others found no response (Lozner, 1941 ; Liu, Chu, Yu, Hsu & Cheng, 1941). In guinea-pigs, Aron (1939) corrected anaemia with vitamin C. Bartley, Krebs & O'Brien (1953) and Crandon, Lund & Dill (1940) failed to produce anaemia in experimental vitamin C deficiency in human subjects. Thus, although much work has been carried out on this subject the position is still obscure. It seems possible that the divergent results reported in the past have been the result of varying experimental conditions. In many of the experiments reported, both with human subjects and with guinea-pigs, nutritional deficiencies other than of vitamin C appear to have been present. An examination of the diets, the age of the experimental animals, the time taken for scurvy to develop, and, when human beings were used, the often unavoidably unsatisfactory type of subject, seems to support this view. Crandon et al. (1940), who carried out a carefully controlled experiment on a human subject, found that in spite of frequent withdrawals of blood for examination, involving a total loss of 6000 ml throughout the experiment, no sign of anaemia was apparent after 6 months on a scorbutogenic diet. Bartley et al. (1953) reported that human volunteers, after 8 months on a scorbutogenic diet, with definite signs of vitamin C deficiency, had normal haemoglobin levels and red-cell counts. These two experiments are among the few where carefully controlled vitamin C deficiency has been produced in the human subject. In many guinea-pig experiments the diets used have been unsatisfactory, either because of their deficiency in various growth factors, or because of the possible presence of vitamin C. When a satisfactory semi-synthetic diet for guinea-pigs (Reid & Briggs, 1953) became available, a re-examination of the blood picture in guinea-pig scurvy seemed likely to prove of value in solving the problem of the connexion (if any) between anaemia and scurvy. The present paper describes such an investigation.