Cure?

The bulbous hearts of high blood pressure victims chirked up last week with hopes that a cure, at least a palliative, for their malady had been devised.

High blood pressure, a disease mainly of old age results from many causes--riotous living, too strenuous athletics, brain fatigue, disease, any undue strain on the human corporation. To repair damage to worn or fatigued tissues the heart works harder to pump cleansing, healing blood. Normally the arteries--flexible, elastic, contractile tubes springing directly from the heart as the great aorta and ending far away as tiny arterioles--expand as the blood enters them, then contract progressively to push the blood onward to the ends of the body--to the brain, the vitals, the tissues of the heart itself, the limbs, the skin. From the terminal arterioles tiny capillaries suck this blood into venules like tiny, feeble fountains trickling foul blood back to the heart. This venous blood the heart pumps into the lungs for the filth to be burnt there by inhaled oxygen, carried away as carbon dioxide. From the lungs the blood returns red to the heart, which starts it again through the arteries.

In normal people expansion and contraction of the heart and the arteries go on without effort in perfect team play. But when the heart--in the worn-out or sick-- must push the blood in abnormal amount or at too great speed through the arteries, these stretch, lose their elasticity, their contractile powers. They thicken in spots: thin in others. Them too the blood tries to heal; brings serum to weak spots, serum which turns gelatinous, gelatine which hardens, calcifies. The arteries become ropy, then hard like the stems of clay pipes. The patient has hardening of the arteries.

A stroke of apoplexy or a fit of angina pectoris is horrible to see, infinitely more horrible to pass through. The victim counts himself as captured by Death, thenceforth a tolerated thrall. A docility comes upon choleric, domineering men; an apathetic quietude rules their minds and bodies. They must be quiet, cease all activities, else they burst their heart or a blood vessel.

To such forced idlers last week came a flickering hope expounded by Dr. W. J. MacDonald, surgeon and physiological experimenter, of St. Catherine's, Ontario, before the Toronto Academy of Medicine. For seven months Dr. McDonald has neglected his practice to work in the laboratories of Toronto University under the guidance of Dr. J. J. R. Macleod, skilled inspirer of students, keen biological chemist, co-discoverer with Dr. F. G. Banting of insulin, hope of diabetics (TIME, Aug. 27, 1923).

Drs. MacDonald and Macleod have crushed beef livers (from healthy two-year-old animals), let serum rise from the maceration, filtered, titrated, decanted the serum, got a whitish grey fluid which they injected into the muscles of men suffering from high blood pressure.

Cautious, not too assuring, Dr. MacDonald pointed out that he is not certain of the curative factor contained in his liver extract, not even of the way that factor acts on the human system. Yet he did point at some results: that of 33 patients with high blood pressure, which is the gauge for measuring hardening of the arteries, in 32 of these cases his extract caused a smoother, more normal flow of blood; that results have been permanent or semipermanent; that his patients can resume ordinary occupations for the most part; that he has so nearly standardized the liver extract that he can almost predict results.