Search

SummaryAdministration of glucagon intravenously to 7 normal subjects resulted in prompt abolition of gastric hunger contractions on each of 16 occasions. This was associated with decrease in the experience of hunger and coincided with a rise in blood glucose levels and an increased peripheral capillary-venous glucose difference. Fall in blood glucose levels with decreasing capillary-venous differences was associated with a return of hunger contractions and intensification of the experience of hunger in 14 of the 16 occasions. Such a pattern may be a component of the normal satiety mechanism.

NUTRITION in clinical medicine has come to have several different connotations depending on whether one is thinking of diagnosis and specific treatment or of patient management. Under the first hea...

The effect of a medium chain triglyceride (MCT) preparation on blood ketones was determined in fourteen normal subjects and six patients with diabetes mellitus of the maturity-onset type. Ingestion of 100 gm. of the MCT (containing 86 per cent C8 and 14 per cent C10 fatty acids) was followed by a small but statistically significant rise in blood ketones in each of the groups. The rise in ketones was slightly but significantly higher in the diabetic patients than in the normal subjects. In all subjects, ketone rises were negligible after ingestion of 100 gm. of corn oil. The ketogenic effect of MCT may result in part from its rapid absorption from the gut, with a high proportion of the component fatty acids traveling in the portal vein directly to the liver in the free acid form. In the liver, these fatty acids appear to be rapidly degraded and converted in part to ketones. The predictable mild hyperketonemia induced by MCT makes this glyceride a useful tool in the study of ketogenesis.

SummaryRats with depot fat enriched with undecanoate maintain significantly higher concentrations of liver glycogen and plasma glucose during prolonged starvation than do conventionally fed controls. When food motivated behavior was tested by means of a progressive ratio schedule of reinforcement, the undecanoate-enriched rats exhibited a significantly lower drive for food after 48 hr of starvation than did their nonenriched controls.We thank K. Porikos for critical comments on the manuscript and C. Wang and K. Ellis for technical assistance.

ONE of the most frustrating features of primary biliary cirrhosis is pruritus, often so intense and unrelenting that the victim seriously contemplates suicide.1 Such patients suffer from chronic insomnia and irritability, and their bodies become covered with excoriations from uncontrollable scratching. Attempts to control the intolerable itching with sedatives, analgesics, glucocorticoids and methyltestosterone have met with little success. Recently, norethandrolone has been reported fairly effective in relieving the pruritus; however, its administration is associated with deepening jaundice and other side effects.2 3 4 Bile acids accumulate in the blood of patients with primary biliary cirrhosis, and it has been proposed that the . . .

Serum Lipids and Atherogenesis With this necessarily sketchy discussion of lipid physiology as a background, it is appropriate to consider what the relation of the serum lipids and atherosclerosis ...

SATURATED odd-chain fatty acids such as valerate (C5) and pelargonate (C9) are metabolized differently from even-numbered saturated fatty acids in the same range of carbon chain length, caproate (C6) and caprylate (C8)1–4. The three terminal carbons of the odd-chain acids appear to be metabolized as a unit, which can serve as a carbohydrate precursor, in contrast to the behaviour of the terminal two-carbon units of even-chain acids. Digestion of glycerides of odd-chain fatty acids and absorption and transport of the digestion products appear to have been little studied.