Colored People

Addison's disease, rare and usually fatal malady which ordinarily colors its victims anywhere from a light yellow to a deep brown and even black, has been treated successfully. Announcement of that important fact came last week from the Long Island Biological Association at Cold Spring Harbor, L. I., where Professor Wilbur Willis Swingle of Princeton and Joseph John Pfiffner developed the medicine. It is a purified extract, a hormone, of the suprarenal glands.* Johns Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic have used the extract on some 30 cases of Addison's disease. One case reacted favorably in 48 hours. Thomas Addison (1793-1860), English physician, traced this disease named for him to derangements of the suprarenal glands. Victims of Addison's disease (men are more often afflicted than women) are almost always between 20 and 40. They feel weak all over; their stomachs are irritable; their blood pressure is low; and, most notably, their skin deepens in color. They usually die during a fainting spell. The notable pigmentation is deceptive. Many another condition causes similar discoloring: pregnancy, constipation, cancer, chronic stomach ulcers, abdominal growths, pernicious anemia. Affection, most often tuberculosis, of the suprarenal glands, is the cause of Addison's disease. The glands are two small bodies, shaped like cocked hats and one perched at the top of each kidney. Each gland is made up of a cortex or rind and a medulla or pith. The two are inseparably united, more so than the core and pulp of an apple. Medulla and cortex have different embryonic origins. The medulla originally buds off from the same cells which provide the sympathetic nervous system. The cortex begins in the same cells whence the urogenital system derives. During the past three or four years various investigators have shown that the adrenal (another name for suprarenal) cortex is essential for life, the medulla not. The cortex has some relation to the sex organs. Enlargement may occur with pseudohermaphroditism (the "man"' or 'woman" has the genitals of the apparently opposite sex). Enlargement may cause premature puberty. A tumor after puberty makes women hairy, their voices masculine. The normal cortex seems to control cellular growth throughout the body. Hence the experimental use of a blind extract to treat cancer (TIME, Feb. 24 et seq.}. The medulla secretes epinephrine, hormone which affects blood pressure. In some way it influences the skin color and possibly muscular vigor. That is one reason why most physiologists have believed that disease of the medulla was the main cause of Addison's disease. But the Swingle-Pfiffner hormone, extracted from the suprarenal cortex of cattle, seems to prove the cortex much more important than the medulla. If the medulla decays, other parts of the sympathetic system apparently assume its duties sufficiently to sustain life. If the cortex goes, only hope, now demonstrated, is the Swingle-Pfiffner hormone.

* Parke, Davis & Co., Detroit manufacturing druggists, merit some credit for this discovery. Dr. Pfiffner worked for them as a research chemist. His superior was Dr. Oliver Kamm, director of Parke, Davis' Chemical Research Laboratory. Dr. Kamm isolated two hormones of another ductless gland, the pituitary (TIME, Jan. 14, 1929).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.