Abstract
That NaCl is beneficial in the treatment of experimental adrenal insufficiency was established by the earlier work of Stewart and Rogoff, 1 Banting and Gairns, 2 Marine and Baumann, 3 and Corey; 4 and the recent work of Loeb et al, 5 , 6 Harrop et al, 7 Swingle et al, 8 Zwemer, 9 and Rubin and Krick. 10
A consensus of the findings is that NaCl feeding in dogs and cats will prolong, but not indefinitely maintain, life after total adrenal ablation. Rubin and Krick found, however, that in 8 rats a drinking solution of 0.0329% CaCl2, 0.015% MgCl, 0.07% NaCl and 0.035% KCl given upon the appearance of adrenal insufficiency symptoms, would maintain life for 4 months or more in animals which normally would not live longer than 10 days. At the time of their publication these authors had apparently not determined, by discontinuing treatment, whether accessory adrenals had assumed a functional condition. From their work it would appear that the rat, unlike the cat and dog, will live indefinitely if fed a high salt diet after adrenalectomy. At the time of Rubin and Krick's publication we were studying the effects of adding salt to the diets of adrenalectomized rats. In addition to this we adopted their technique of adding salt to the drinking water, a method probably more effective.
In previous experience with our rat colony we found that approximately 95% do not survive adrenalectomy. 11 In the latest adult control series 4 out of 24 survived longer than 30 days, 2 longer than SO days.
In the present experiments, 1.5% NaCl was added to the stock diet∗ in part of the cases, 2.5% in the others. Either the Rubin-Krick salt solution or 0.9% NaCl solution was given the animals to drink. As far as we could tell one of these feeding-drinking combinations was no more effective than another, so further distinctions between them are not made here.
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