Cancer & Hormones

Many of the most alert minds in U.S. medicine were assembled in Atlantic City last week for a give & take on what's new. As usual, much that the researchers had delved for would not make much differ ence to ailing mankind for years to come. But a report to the American Society for

Clinical Investigation, whose members are dubbed "the Young Turks" (TIME, May 19, 1952), bore directly on the current treatment of breast cancer.

Surgeons have been removing the ovaries of women with advanced cancer of the breast on the theory that the ovarian hormones (estrogens) favor the growth of the cancer. But Dr. Olof H. Pearson of Manhattan's Memorial Center found that this surgery seemed to slow the spread of such cancers in only 30% to 50% of the cases. With two other doctors, he conducted a close study of cases to learn why.

Their conclusion: what has seemed to be a single type of cancer is really two. One form can be treated best by removing the sources of female hormones (ovaries and sometimes adrenals) and perhaps by giving male hormones; the second requires the opposite treatment--leaving the estrogen sources intact, perhaps even giving extra estrogens and cortisone. To type a patient's cancer and decide whether the ovaries should be removed, the doctors have only to trace her pattern of calcium excretion through a single menstrual cycle.

At another meeting in Atlantic City, the Association of American Physicians (dubbed, willy-nilly, "the Old Turks") heard about a new disease with a name like a Greek railway station: agammaglobulinemia. This is the condition which exists, said Dr. Charles A. Janeway of Harvard Medical School, when a patient lacks his natural share of gamma globulin, the immunity-carrying element in human blood. So far, all such patients have proved to be male.

The new disease, discovered in an Army dependent by Colonel Ogden C. Bruton, is rare, fortunately, and is probably a byproduct of the antibiotic age. "Before the days of penicillin," said Dr. Janeway, "these patients must have succumbed to the extremely severe infections which either caused the condition or first brought it to light." Nobody knows yet whether agammaglobulinemia is present at birth or is picked up later in life. But its discovery may help to explain why some patients never seem to develop resistance against normally mild infections, and may die as a result.

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