Abstract
There has been much disagreement among investigators concerning the life-span of the rat after adrenalectomy. While the majority of workers prior to 1930 found that 50% or more of their rats survived adrenalectomy, due to the presence of accessory cortical adrenal bodies, several more recent workers 1 - 4 have reported that all or nearly all of their animals died after adrenal removal. Gaunt 5 offered evidence indicating that these inconsistent results may have been in part due to inherent colony differences in the susceptibility to adrenal removal. This report offers further evidence for such colony differences.
Dr. J. T. Lewis of the Instituto de Fisiologia, Buenos Aires, one of the investigators to find high percentages of survival after adrenalectomy, sent a group of his rats to Dr. W. W. Swingle of Princeton University in the care of Dr. De Meio. He requested that they be adrenalectomized and their survival compared to colonies we had previously studied. Professor Swingle sent these animals to us to conduct this study.
To eliminate variable factors due to care, diet, climate, etc., none of the original animals obtained from Dr. Lewis' colony were used in these experiments, but only the offspring, born and raised in our laboratory, in the same room with our animals.
Operative technique and care were as previously described. 5 Considerable of the adrenal pedicle and adjacent fat were removed, although this precaution does not apparently influence our survival results.
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