Mucolytic enzyme systems. X. Serum hyaluronidase inhibitor in liver disease.

The hyaluronidase inhibiting property of blood serum has been found to be increased in such diverse clinical states as infectious diseases of bacterial and viral origin (1-4), neoplastic disease (5, 6), and the postpartum state in women (7) as well as in several of the so-called "collagen diseases" of unknown etiology, notably rheumatic fever (8, 9), disseminated lupus erythematosis (2) and dermatomyositis (2). Intensive studies to determine the anatomical site of origin and to understand better the nature of this substance have been undertaken, and are still under way in this laboratory. Clear evidence of the site of origin of the inhibiting substance is lacking. Wattenberg and Glick (10), in an analysis of a wide variety of tissues from the rabbit, found it in none of the material studied. In the course of their investigations they noted that certain hemoglobin derivatives and steroids possessed inhibitory properties; extending their observations, they noted that many similar chemical compounds also produced inhibition, but that such compounds were uniformly heat stable and not, as is the serum inhibitor, heat labile. The interest in these investigations, as well as in the current one, has been in the nonspecific inhibitor which will act on the enzyme regardless of its source, rather than the specific antibody inhibitors that develop when hyaluronidase is used as an antigen (11). It has also been found that the inhibitor migrates with 'albumin in an electrophoretic field (12, 13). This migration with serum albumin, and the finding of an inhibiting property inherent in various products of liver metabolism (10), prompted an evaluation of the serum inhibiting property in disorders of the liver, since it was felt that a de-