Word: acth
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...window. At 22, Peggy had often tried to "kick it cold" (give it up), but she had gone back to "H" every time. That made her just the kind of girl Dr. John Hogness of the University of Washington was looking for. Hogness wanted to find out whether ACTH would help addicts over the agonizing withdrawal period. Peggy needed help for another reason: she was about to have a baby, and babies are sometimes born with the mother's addiction...
Like the nine other hopheads in the roundup, Peggy agreed to let Dr. Hogness go to work. For the first three days of the seven-day course he gave the ACTH intravenously, then switched to muscle injections. Peggy's response was spectacular. Though profuse sweating, cramps, headaches, diarrhea and vomiting usually occur during withdrawal, Peggy suffered from none of these. Her baby was born and showed no sign of addiction...
Five other cases did as well as Peggy under ACTH; two more did almost as well, suffering nothing worse than mild periods of sweating. Two were failures...
...team of assistants have been getting encouraging results with new drugs. One of the first to show promise was nitrogen mustard (a deadly poison developed in World War II for chemical warfare). Newer and better, Dr. Farber believes, are the awkwardly named "folk acid antagonists." These, like ACTH and cortisone, are most often effective against the leukemias...
When little Carolyn Joan Purcell had trouble seeing her Christmas gifts last year, Atlanta doctors thought she had cancer and would have to lose both eyes. But the Mayo Clinic disagreed, called it merely an infection, treated her with ACTH. In Alpharetta, Ga. last week 5-year-old Carolyn Joan's eyes sparkled at sight of the 1951 tree she had not been expected...