Word: acth
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Before such potent hormones as cortisone and ACTH were discovered, doctors could offer little to victims of rheumatoid arthritis except aspirin-simply, they thought, to ease the pain. But just when cortisone became generally available, researchers made a surprising discovery: far from being a mere painkiller, aspirin has the biological power (like ACTH, but to a lesser degree) of stimulating the adrenal glands to produce their cortisone-like hormones. Still, U.S. doctors took it for granted that cortisone itself must be better, went on prescribing it lavishly (daily cost to U.S. patient...
...Doctors who gave up using ACTH for some common eye diseases quit too soon, two Michigan researchers told the Association of American Physicians. For inflammation of the optic nerve, and also for degenerative diseases of the choroid and retina, ACTH can be given for a year or two, may then restore 20-20 vision to patients who have been almost blind...
Broadly speaking, stress diseases are caused when the "combat mechanism" of the body goes into action under some shock, the thyroid demanding a "purposeless increase" in metabolic output, the pituitary sending ACTH flooding to the adrenals, and the blood pressure, blood salt and blood sugar increasing. Once stimulated by shock, the mechanism keeps on going. The human system is exhilarated, but badly unbalanced. Exhaustion usually follows, often with a dangerous lowering of the body's normal resistance to infection...
Last week Georgetown University's Dr. O. Benwood Hunter Jr. reported that cortisone and ACTH will do this in most cases. The level of the mother's hormone secretions is carefully checked as pregnancy advances, and if it indicates that the baby's red blood cells are not forming properly, or are being destroyed, the mother gets cortisone. (Sometimes she also gets ACTH to step up her own and the baby's production of adrenal hormones like cortisone...
...seven patients, 45 of them children with acute leukemia, have been treated with the drug to date; about 30% of them have had remissions of the disease lasting from one to six months. After treatment by other methods of combating acute leukemia, such as the antifolics and the hormones, ACTH and cortisone, patients are likely to develop resistance which makes treatment no longer effective. In such cases 6-mercaptopurine may buy more time...