The destruction of adrenalin by spinal fluid

Abstract

Soon after the discovery of the profound effect of adrenal extract upon blood-pressure the question arose as to the fate of this extract in the blood. The rise of the blood-pressure after an intravenous injection of adrenin passes off in a few minutes and none of the adrenin is found to persist in the blood, no matter how large the injected dose has been. The quite natural explanation of this phenomenon was, that the blood destroys adrenin. But Oliver and Schäfer found that in a mixture of adrenin and blood, even after standing for 22 hours, the adrenin remained unaffected. It has been confirmed since by several investigators, that neither blood nor serum is capable of destroying adrenal extract. I shall not discuss for the present the problem of the fate of adrenin in the body in general. I wish only to report the discovery of the fact that there is at least one body fluid which is capable of destroying adrenin and that is spinal fluid. The observation was made by mixing human spinal fluid with adrenalin. The spinal fluids were obtained in the first place from a number of cases of poliomyelitis of the Rockefeller Hospital and from two cases of tuberculous meningitis, obtained for me by Dr. Flexner. But this destructive action is not specific to these diseases. I found it to be possessed by spinal fluids from cases of resolving pneumonia, gastro-enteritis and eczema, obtained through the kindness of Dr. Wollstein. Evidently it is a physiologic property of normal spinal fluids, although there seems to be a difference in degree of action between some pathologic cases; for instance the spinal fluid from poliomyelitis seems to destroy adrenalin definitely more readily than that from tuberculous meningitis.