No abstract

PREVIOUS investigators1 have noted abnormalities in the carbohydrate metabolism of psychotic persons. Their studies have concentrated chiefly on the response of the blood sugar to ingested dextrose, and have revealed that there exists a reduction in the dextrose tolerance, with resulting diabetic-like levels of blood sugar. To determine whether this abnormal trend is due to a dysfunction of the insulinogenic mechanisms, Freemanla and Braceland1c investigated the insulin tolerance of schizophrenic subjects and found that such patients show a less pronounced fall in blood sugar after the administration of insulin than do normal subjects.In order to determine whether resistance to insulin is a characteristic feature of the schizophrenic psychosis alone, I made a study of this function in other mental disorders. METHOD AND MATERIALThe subjects included 93 soldiers discharged from the Army for psychiatric disorders. The average age of the patients lay between 20 and 25. Their nutrition was on the whole good, the average nutritional index being 98 per cent of the ideal (according to standards of the Metropolitan Insurance Company). Few were grossly overweight or underweight. The average stay in the Army before psy¬ chiatric symptoms appeared was six months. Each patient had been confined in a mental disease hospital in the military service for an average of two months before the present study. These patients showed many varieties of psychiatric symptoms, although in general the clinical status showed less clearly defined and more transitory types of disturbance than are ordinarily found· in the civilian population.The technic of the test was simple. After a postabsorptive period of at least fourteen hours, a control sample of blood was taken, and insulin was then administered intravenously in a dose of 0.1 unit per kilogram of body weight. Subsequent samples of blood were taken at regular thirty minute intervals, with the patient lying quietly in bed.