Research Reports

Doctors in St. Louis for the A.M.A.'s clinical sessions heard these reports of progress on research frontiers:

P: Extreme pessimism regarding cancer of the lung is no longer justified, said the University of Tennessee's Dr. Duane Carr. Even in cases which are found too late for surgery to help, deep X-ray treatments and drugs (nitrogen mustard and triethylene melamine) will relieve pain and prolong life.

P: Better yet, doctors from Manhattan's Memorial Center demonstrated a promising and simple procedure for detecting lung cancers early. With a deep cough, the patient brings up sputum into a little bottle of jsopropyl alcohol. (He can take the bottle home overnight.) A Papanicolaou smear (TIME, Aug. 21, 1950) shows whether cancerous cells are present. Remote general practitioners can use the technique if they mail the bottle to a qualified laboratory.

P: Testing a new drug by comparing its effects with those of sugar pills may give confusing results. Dr. Stewart Wolf, reporting on experiments at Manhattan's New York Hospital, told how batches of a new drug and sugar pills were bottled and labeled with code numbers so that not even the doctors knew when a patient was getting which. Just as many patients felt lightheaded, drowsy or lost their appetite on sugar pills as on the drug. One suffered "overwhelming weakness, palpitation and nausea" within a few minutes of taking either. Another had pain, diarrhea, itching and swelling of the lips ten minutes after either kind of pill. All this means that if a patient gets sick after taking a drug, it may not be the drug's fault.

P: Hardening of the arteries may be not one disease but many, depending on which arteries are affected, reported Dr. Herman T. Blumenthal of the Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. Arteries of the brain, heart and legs are more susceptible to hardening than those of the lungs, liver and kidneys --perhaps because the arteries are made of different types of tissue. Thus, he suggested, the site of the disease may determine its type. Metabolic changes, which have received so much attention, may be the result rather than the cause of the aging and hardening of the arteries.

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