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Johns Hopkins' Professor Dean DeWitt Lewis, who is the new A. M. A. president, said that he hunts for a tumor of the parathyroid when he gets a case of bone cyst. The cysts "develop and the bones get softer and shorter because the diseased parathyroid cannot produce enough hormones to hold calcium in the bones. Surgeon Lewis cuts out the parathyroid tumors, cures his patients.
Drs. Max Ballin and PI inn F. Morse of Detroit look at more than the para-thyroids when bones go wrong. The thyroid is frequently involved in cases of arthritis, although its main influence is in a general weakening of the bones without localizing the trouble. Disease of the pancreas or of the adrenals may also affect the bones. They mentioned a man who broke a leg while sneezing. Autopsy showed a diseased pancreas and a parathyroid tumor.
The pancreas, an adjunct to the bowels, produces insulin whose dramatic influence on diabetes matches the dramatic effect of iodine on goitre. When the pancreas is inactive or diseased it produces too little insulin for the system. Hence diabetes. Too active a pancreas produces too much insulin, causes an opposite disease called hyperinsulinism. or ''hungry disease." Dr. Scale Harris of Birmingham, who has studied this phenomenon for ten years, described the symptoms as excessive hunger accompanied by weakness, nervousness, tremors, sweating and mental lapses. Many a person considered to be an epileptic actually suffers only from "hunger disease," said Dr. Harris. Only positive way to diagnose hunger disease is to find abnormally little sugar in the blood. Most important cause of the hyperinsulinism is an inflamed pancreas. Careful adherence to a diet low in starches and sugars and high in fats will control mild cases. In more severe cases, as in severe goitres, a surgeon must remove part of the gland. Pancreatic surgery is much more difficult than thyroid surgery.
A newly discovered function of the adrenals which Columbia University's Professor Raymund Lull Zwemer recognizes, is the regulation of salt and water in the body. This power resembles the power of insulin on sugar, the parathyroid on calcium, the thyroid on iodine. Common salt benefits cases of Addison's disease, a disease caused by defective adrenals.
The thyroid received little attention at last fortnight's meetings, apparently because its physiology is broadly understood and because the number of goitre cases in the country is shrinking (TIME. May 29). Nor did the sex glands per se come up for much discussion. The pituitary predominated over all.
*Other organs which probably secrete hormones: pineal (in the brain), thymus (back of the collar bone), liver, heart, spleen.