Recent advances in endocrinology / by A.T. Cameron.

  • Alexander Thomas Cameron
Date:
1933
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Recent advances in endocrinology / by A.T. Cameron. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    seemed reasonable to conclude that some pituitary lesion caused the condition. The results of earlier extirpation experiments lent support to this view. Intense polyuria was produced (Cushing ; Houssay). The issue became confused in two ways. Injec¬ tion of “ pituitrin ” into an experimental animal sometimes produced diuresis. Damage to brain structures adjacent to the pituitary also caused polyuria. Camus and ltoussy were the leading workers in experiments of the latter type. They summarized the results of their observations in 1920 (21). They found that ablation of the dog’s pituitary produced marked polyuria, but that this was only transient if the base of the brain was uninjured during the operation. Experiments in which the base of the brain bordering on the pituitary was damaged by a heated needle (through a previously perforated sphenoid), while the pituitary was not damaged, resulted in marked polyuria, lasting in some animals for several months. This could not be controlled by injections of pituitary extracts. Such damage must be within the opto-peduncular region at the level of the grey substance of the tuber cinereum. A few of their animals developed genital atrophy, and this also they attributed to damage of brain tissue rather than to a pituitary lesion. (Cf. also Bailey and Bremer (7).) Cushing (24) has given the clearest and most harmonious account of this problem which is so far available in the literature. He admits that “ most of the earlier experimental hypophysectomies on dogs now unquestionably lie open to the just criticism first raised by Aschner (1912) that a coincidental damage of the adjacent tuberal nerve centres probably accounted for the post-operative polyurias, glycosurias, as well as the more tardy adiposity and genital atrophy that not infrequently supervened. Whether the canine gland was approached from below through the pharynx, or from the side by elevating the temporal lobe,