Effects of Adrenalectomy on the Blood Count of the Rat

Abstract

Study of the literature concerning changes in the blood picture during adrenal insufficiency reveals that the results reported by different workers are not in complete agreement. While the experiments of Corey and Britton 1 show an increase in the red cells and lymphocytes, accompanied by a decrease in the neutrophiles, those of Simpson, Dennison and Korenchevsky 2 show a decrease in the red cells and lymphocytes with not much change in the total white cell count, whereas the effects observed by Shecket, Friedman and Nice 3 were leukocytosis, Iymphocytosis and neutropenia.

The difference in these results led us to repeat these experiments.

In a first experiment, six male hooded rats, weighing 150-200 g, were adrenalectomized and blood taken from the tail was examined at. regular intervals until their death. The results obtained for each category of blood cell did not permit us to draw definite conclusions; for example, 3 of the rats showed a decrease in the red cells, the others, an increase. We believed that these results, similar to those reported before by other workers, were caused by differences in the ability of individual animals to resist surgical shock and hemorrhage subsequent to the operation, as well as to small variations in the degree of shock and hemorrhage produced.

In a second experiment, therefore, 8 male rats of similar weights were given 1 cc injections of Wilson's cortical extract daily for 3 days following adrenalectomy. Thus we eliminated any individual differences due to operative procedure.