Word: porphyria
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...common drug reactions involves isoniazid, the most widely used drug against tuberculosis. One of the rarer reactions is found among victims of porphyria (see following story), who suffer acute attacks if they take barbiturates; they may also be sensitive to the sulfas. At the opposite end of the reaction scale, some victims of an unusual form of rickets need more than 1,000 times the normal quantity of vitamin D before they respond...
...however, two British psychiatrists who re-examined George's medical records in the light of new medical knowledge are proposing a radically different interpretation. Drs. Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, her son, suggest in the British Medical Journal that George III suffered from porphyria, a rare hereditary metabolic disorder that can lead to severe mental disturbances...
...George III was insane. Now two London psychiatrists have gone back over the medical records, including some still unpublished, and concluded that the historians are nuts. Dr. Richard Hunter and his mother, Dr. Ida Macalpine, wrote in the British Medical Journal that George was obviously suffering from "acute, intermittent porphyria," a rare liver disease that upset the royal nervous system and made the king delirious...
...strange sickness is incurable and not fully understood. Through an inborn metabolic quirk, the body produces an excess of porphyrins, chemicals that are usually produced only in tiny amounts and seem somehow to be involved with the body's sensitivity to the sun. In some forms of porphyria, skin sensitivity is slight, but the victim suffers severe abdominal pains, bizarre mental disturbances, and sometimes respiratory paralysis. Mrs. Carlson suffers from a form called porphyria cutaneatarda, in which the porphyrin overproduction can be traced to an inherited liver malfunction. Doctors have studied such cases for years, but have only recently...
...knowledge is interesting; but to Mrs. Carlson, it means little that two Harvard Medical School researchers studied porphyria patients to find out whether a major change in the porphyrin content of their skin takes place before or after exposure to sunlight. Dr. J. W. Burnett and Dr. M. A. Pathak examined two victims and three healthy subjects, both after long confinement indoors and after exposure to the sun. In the people with porphyria, output of porphyrin compounds rose sharply after exposure to the light; the others showed no change. Sunlight, the doctors concluded, increases the concentration of porphyrin...