Abstract
It has been demonstrated that hypophysectomy lowers the blood sugar in fasting dogs and rabbits. In dogs—the form in which sugar values are most extensive—the fasting blood-sugar values overlap those of normal animals and prolonged starvation is necessary to lower them to convulsive levels. Moreover, as recently demonstrated, the exposure of the hypophysis by the temporal approach, even though rapid, lowers the blood sugar nearly as much as does the removal of the gland (Chaikoff et al. 1 ) The temporal approach has been used in the studies reported on blood sugar in hypophysectomized dogs.
The hypophysectomies here reported were done by the oral approach. The possibility of brain injury with the technique used is extremely remote due to the toughness of the diaphragma which is uninjured in the operation. In the animals reported as hypophysectomized the complete removal of the anterior and posterior lobes of the pituitary was verified by a study of serial sections. The pars tuberalis was left intact. The material here reported is obtained from 24 normal, 9 completely and 3 partially hypophysectomized monkeys. The blood sugar of monkeys after hypophysectomy always shows such a pronounced drop that there is no overlap between the normal and operated animals after 16-18 hours starvation. Collapse due to hypoglycemia occasionally but not usually accompanied by convulsions which are never severe, happened frequently after 18 hours of starvation. This led US to reduce the fasting period to 16 hours. Even non-fasted animals may go into hypoglycemic'collapse and have to be injected with glucose. Frequent and adequate feeding is necessary to maintain the hypophysectomized monkey. None of the 3 animals which were shown subsequently to be only partially hypophysectomized ever went into collapse.
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