No abstract

Randomly labeled C'4-digitoxin was used in a quantitative study of the renal excretion of unchanged digitoxin and its metabolites in three human subjects with cardiac insufficiency. The elimination of approximately 60 to 80 per cent of an administered dose through the kidney suggests that the major route of elimination of digitoxin in cardiac patients is through the urinary route. There is a marked initial excretion of digitoxin during the first two days after administration of the radioactive drug followed by a gradual leveling off of the excretion gradient thereafter. Minute amounts of unchanged digitoxin have been detected in the urine up to the fortieth day after administration of a single dose of the glycoside, while Cl4-labeled compounds were detected up to the seventy-fourth day.U -NTIL RECENTLY, the lack of suitable analytic methods has hindered quantitative studies of the renal excretion of digitalis glycosides. Utilizing only bioassay technics, early investigators'-5 concluded that little if any of the various glycosides studied was excreted in the urine of various species of laboratory animals after oral or parenteral administration. Recently, however, Friedman and co-workers,6-9 employing the sensitive embryonic duck heart method, reported that rats, rabbits and dogs excrete negligible amounts of digitoxin in the

No abstract

No abstract

The Vmiversity of Chicago FOUR TEXT FIQUILE~ AND THREE P L A~S (THIRTEEN FIG^)In 1929 Wislocki published a description of the hypophysis of the porpoise (Tursiops truncatus). The two principal conclusions of this study were that in the porpoise the processus infundibuli is separated anatomically from the buccal portion of the hypophysis and that the pars intermedia and hypophyseal cleft are completely lacking in the adult porpoise, the pars buccalis consisting solely of a pars tuberalis and of a pars distalis.These findings interested Geiling so much that he undertook an investigation of the hypophysis of the larger whales with the object of studying the active principles of the two dissociated components if the parts of their pituitaries proved to be anatomically separate as in the porpoise. A brief note, meanwhile, by ValsS ('34) on the hormone content of the hypophysis of the blue whale (Balaenoptera sibbaldii) stated that the anterior and posterior lobes of the pituitary of this whale are easily separable. The first fruits of Geiling's study ( '35) appeared in a rather extensive report on the assay of the pituitary glands of finback and sperm whales. The anatomical observations accompanying these studies bore out the great resemblance of the finback and sperm whales' hypophyses to that of the porpoise ('29). According to Geiling's observations, the pituitary glands in these whales are made up of a large, flattened anterior lobe and a smaller posterior lobe separated by a septum. Moreover, there is no 17