Word: vitamine
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Wait for Evidence. Medical scientists' best guess as to how thalidomide damages the fetus is that rapidly dividing cells mistake it for either glutamic acid or a B vitamin, absorb it, and fail to develop normally. In theory, thalidomide might block the metabolic processes of rapidly dividing cancer cells by the same mechanism. But thalidomide failed dismally in its first routine trials against animal cancers in the U.S., and has shown no promise in more detailed tests now in progress...
...well-advertised bottle of vitamins has earned itself such a prominent place on the American breakfast table that many a mother has been moved to cram the kids with pills. If a little of the stuff is good-so the reasoning runs-a lot must be better. Not so, says Orthopedic Surgeon Charles N. Pease; parents should pay more heed to warnings about the possible dangers from vitamin overdosage. In the A.M.A. Journal, Dr. Pease cites specific examples of damage done by too much vitamin A: it has stunted children's growth or left one leg two to three...
Even in the best hospitals. vitamin-A child poisoning often goes undetected because its very symptoms-irritableness, painful movements, and tenderness to the examining doctor's touch-along with X-ray changes, are all too easily confused with the signs of syphilis, leukemia, or even, ironically, scurvy, which results from a deficiency of vitamin C. But if the X rays show premature hardening of the gristlelike ends where children's bones grow, says Dr. Pease, physicians should be alert for vitamin poisoning...
...Chicago. Dr. Pease has studied one 18-year-old girl ever since she was seven. When he first saw the patient, her left leg was already two inches shorter than her right. He learned that when she was three, her mother had given her almost three teaspoonfuls of vitamin-A preparation every day-about 50 times as much as the three drops her doctor had prescribed to treat a mild rash. The overdosage could be measured in the girl's blood, which showed a vitamin-A level of 943 units, compared with a normal range...
Died. Dr. Conrad Arnold Elvehjem, 61, president for six years of the University of Wisconsin and biochemist whose identification of nicotinic acid as a new vitamin (now called niacin) led directly to the cure of pellagra, and who won medicine's Lasker Award in 1952; of a heart attack; in Madison...