Vasomotor Paralysis Research Articles

The effect on the normal dog heart of expressed tissue juice from hearts of dogs poisoned with diphtheria toxin

The injection of moderately large doses of diphtheria toxins into animals is followed by no change in arterial blood pressure until after the elapse of a certain latent period, varying from 24 hours in the rabbit to 2-4 days in the dog, when it begins to fall. The fall in blood pressure, having once occurred, rapidly proceeds, so that within a very short time the animal is dead (30 minutes in the rabbit). Both vasomotor paralysis and cardiac failure are responsible for the fall, although it is evident that the cardiac failure is the more important as the immediate cause of death, since mere isolation of the vasomotor center — as after spinal transection — is not followed by such rapid cardiac failure. The vasomotor paralysis of course accelerates the cardiac failure.1Roily further found that isolation by Hering's method of the heart of a rabbit just dying as a result of diphtheria inoculation and its perfusion with blood from a healthy animal did not in the slightest degree delay the failure.Although a ce...

SHOCK, HEMORRHAGE AND SEPTCEMIA.

In tabulating the symptoms of shock and hemorrhage, we usually note the following : An expressionless countenance, pallor, with corresponding coldness of face and mucous membrane, and clammy skin, often slight or profuse sweats, chilly sensations, irregular heart action, with weak, irregular, thready, often imperceptible pulse, and irregular sighing respiration. These two conditions, shock and hemorrhage, or rather their symptoms, are so intimately associated that I will not take time mentioning the slight variations or the local conditions found in hemorrhage alone. In the symptoms of septicemia we at first find the essential signs of fever, with often a full, bounding pulse; but later we get the feeble, less regular pulse, sighing respiration, clammy skin with slight or profuse sweats, countenance expressionless, or expressing great concern, the secretions from the bowels and kidneys scanty, and as regards these symptoms they are all due to a vasomotor paralysis, either

THE TROPHO-NEUROSES OF PARETIC DEMENTIA

In presenting for your consideration a brief review of the vasomotor abnormalities exhibited in the clinical history of paretic dementia, I do so, not that I am able to offer anything new, but to accentuate the important part which neuro-angio-paralysis plays in the production of many of the most interesting phenomena of this dreaded malady. The vaso-motor and trophic changes, which are observed in both the early and late stages of the disease, are characteristic and important. Glancing hastily over the clinical picture presented by the early stage of paretic dementia, we find an array of symptoms, some of which, if not all, are found in every case. Among these may be mentioned vertigo, flushing of the face, and other evidences of transient an*nmia and hyperrnmia of the brain; alterations in the tension of the pulse, it being high in the more active forms of the disease and low in the depressive form (Spitzka), frequent attacks of headache, associated with a sense of pressure in the head; occasional slight apoplectiform attacks, and many other symptoms familiar to all who have observed cases of paretic dementia in their incipiency. These symptoms are, however, evanescent in character, failing to furnish satisfactory evidence of structural changes in the interstitial or parenchymatous tissues of the brain, they are explicable only on the hypothesis of vaso-motor paralysis. The mental symptoms at this stage of the disease also bear evidence of very slight cerebral disturbance, and are accounted for more satisfactorily by the theory of functional circulatory disturbances than by the belief that real structural changes in the cerebral tissues have occurred. The slight impairment of the mind, which makes its appearance and progresses so slowly; the sudden attacks of mental confusion, synchronous with the flushing of the face and the attacks of cerebral congestion; the blunting of the finer sensibilities, the mild exhileration, the abnormal development of the Ego, the unnatural changeableness of the moods and temper of a formerly well-balanced