Abstract
Beneficial effects of liver therapy in pernicious anemia complicated by neurologic signs of subacute combined degeneration were reported by Minot and Murphy, 1 Richardson, 2 Ungley and Suzman, 3 and others. A histopathologic study of the spinal cords in treated and improved cases of subacute combined degeneration has never been reported. The present study was limited to 7 cases of subacute combined degeneration (due to pernicious anemia) which received liver; 2 of the cases snowed some improvement in the neurologic symptoms.
Transverse and longitudinal sections of the spinal cord of these cases were stained for myelin sheaths, axis cylinders and glia, and compared with sections from 10 untreated cases of subacute combined degeneration. The myelin sheaths and axis cylinders in the treated and untreated cases showed the same changes. The only histopathologic difference observed was that of the glia. In the untreated cases of subacute combined degeneration the glia destruction ran parallel with that of the myelin sheaths and axis cylinders. The poor glia response in subacute combined degeneration is designated by neurohistopathologists as “a regressive glia change”. (Figs. 2a and 2b.) In the treated cases instead of a poor glia response, there was a definite increase in the glia fibers (Figs. 3a and 3b) which is designated as “progressive glia change”.
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