Cure for Trench Mouth

A common ailment of U. S. and British soldiers during World War I was trench mouth, or Vincent's angina. No laughing matter, trench mouth is a painful, sometimes fatal disease, spread by relatives of the syphilis spirochete, which first invade the gums, may later migrate to tonsils, salivary glands and lungs. Trench mouth is most prevalent in summertime when campers use common utensils and cups. To kill the trench mouth spirochete, doctors usually swab their patients' swollen gums with hydrogen peroxide, silver salts or arsphenamine, prescribe mouthwashes of sodium perborate. But such treatment usually lasts for many weeks.

Since the beginning of World War II British doctors, fearing another epidemic, have sought a quick, simple cure for the disease. Last week in the Lancet, Dentist John James Duncan King of the University Field Laboratories in Sheffield, England announced that he had found one: nicotinic acid.

Nicotinic acid, one of the elements of the Vitamin B complex, is found in liver, yeast, milk, green vegetables, fish and lean meat. It is a cure for pellagra, a diet-deficiency disease common in the southern U. S. but virtually unknown in Britain. Since the filmy, bleeding gums of trench mouth are similar to the symptoms of early pellagra, Dr. King had a hunch that trench mouth, too, might be caused by nicotinic acid deficiency which broke down gum tissue, paved the way for bacterial invasion. So he fed small amounts of the acid dissolved in water to 34 patients with severe trench mouth. All of them recovered, some within 48 hours.

Vincent's disease, Dr. King concluded, may be a form of "pre-pellagra." Yet, since most Englishmen eat plenty of lean meat and fish, he found it "difficult to understand how there could be a [nicotinic acid] deficiency." Perhaps, he suggested, some people for unknown chemical reasons cannot absorb nicotinic acid from their food and need an extra supply.

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