Abstract
The immediate cause of thyroid hyperplasia in all probability is a relative or an absolute deficiency of iodine. 1 The fundamental or essential cause of goiter is unknown, but the search for the essential cause, as we have often suggested, appears to resolve itself into determining the cause or causes of the iodine deficiency. As most iodine deficiencies are relative rather than absolute, the search further limits itself largely to determining the factors which create the increased needs of the organism for the iodine containing hormone. The simplest way of increasing the need of the thyroid for iodine would be by depressing the utilization of oxygen in the tissues, and the discovery by Chesney and Webster 2 that the prolonged feeding of cabbage caused thyroid hyperplasia in rabbits appeared to offer a practical means of testing this hypothesis.
It has been shown that there are great seasonal and climatic variations in the goitrogenic activity of cabbage, 3 that drying in a current of air or in vacuo causes a loss of the goitrogenic agent, 4 that prolonged steaming does not impair and under certain conditions may increase its goitrogenic power, 5 that boiling for 30 minutes at pH 3.0 (HC1) does not injure it, 6 that the goitrogenic substance may be extracted from cabbage with ether and other ethereal solvents 7 and that this substance is but slightly extracted by prolonged aqueous leaching.
Since all the Brassicae so far tested may produce goiter and since mustard oils (isothiocyanates) are the most characteristic constituents of these plants it was thought that their goitrogenic activity might be connected in some way with these substances or with their cyanide precursors. Several of the mustard oils (allyl, ethyl, phenyl) have been fed to rabbits with negative results.
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