Telltale Sugar

Metabolism is the dynamic process whereby the body uses food for energy, growth and repairs. Chief regulator of metabolism is the thyroid gland, two small lobes of spongy tissue which straddle the windpipe. Doctors have long worried over the relation between: 1) metabolism; 2) supercharging of the thyroid gland (hyperthyroidism); 3) diabetes. In hyperthyroidism, bodily functions are stepped up, and food is rapidly consumed in a roaring fire of metabolism. After meals, sugars (including digested starches) pile up in the bloodstream. Some of the sugars are converted into furious nervous energy. The excess spills over into the urine, is quickly excreted. Sufferers from hyperthyroidism are spare and undernourished, for their food is so quickly burned up that their body tissues receive little nourishment.

Also a disease of metabolism, diabetes is an inability of the body to use sugars. Diabetics can absorb sugar into their bloodstream, but unlike hyperthyroid patients, they cannot burn it up. The sugars merely "stagnate" in the blood until they pass into the urine. A physician who finds an excess amount of sugar in his patient's urine may assume that he is suffering from both hyperthyroidism and diabetes. But the diseases need opposite treatments. Diabetics, who cannot make use of the sugars they already have, must be deprived of carbohydrates; hyperthyroids, who burn up their sugars too rapidly, must be stoked with a much larger supply of fuel. Diabetics need injections of insulin to convert their sugars to useful work, but for high-gear hyperthyroids, insulin may be fatal.

Dr. Theodore Leonidowitch Althausen, of the University of California, long worried over tragic mistakes made in diagnosing these two diseases. For several years he tried to devise a method which would tell whether a patient suffering from hyperthyroidism also had diabetes. Doctors always assumed that diabetics and hyperthyroids, after meals, passed sugars into their bloodstreams at the same rate of speed. But Dr. Althausen questioned this belief, set to work on the hunch that the rate of speed of sugar absorption depends directly upon the amount of thyroxin produced by the thyroid gland. Thus, hyperthyroids would absorb sugars at a higher rate of speed than diabetics. Last week, he reported a simple new sugar-timing test which he has used successfully on 250 patients. For this long-awaited achievement, he was promptly awarded the Van Meter Prize of $300 by the American Association for the Study of Goiter.

In his test, Dr. Althausen feeds his patients 40 grams of galactose, a sugar derived from milk and certain gummy plants, but not normally present in human blood. After an hour, a drop of blood is taken from an ear lobe, and tested for the presence of galactose. A normal person will have from 20 to 30 milligrams of the sugar in every hundred cubic centimetres of blood; a hyperthyroid. around 70 milligrams; a diabetic, whose thyroid is not stepped up, shows the same amount of galactose as a normal person, although, of course, his blood and urine are saturated with unused body sugars.

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