Absence of Adrenalin in Malignant Renal

Af ter calling at tention to the lack of observations or of any real effort to determine whether adrenalin or adrenalin-like blood pressure raising substances are present in malignant ren,al hypernephromas, Greer and Wells ( I ) report the results of the examination of two specimens, both of which gave entirely negative results. Examinat ion of the l i terature at my command has not revealed much, besides the work of Greer and Wells, in the way of experimental evidence on this question. In, the course of the discussion of a paper, Biedl (2) called at tent ion to the point that all tumors which, when removed by surgical operation or found at autopsy, lead one to suspect by their location or other characteristics that they have developed from medullary adrenal tissue should be examined by making tests for adrenalin in extracts of the tumors ; and that when so tested, tumors arising from chromaffin, tissue of the medulla should show a specific tonus-heightening and especially vasoeonstrict ing substance, while those tumors arising from the cortical tissue should show no such substance. Davidsohn (3) in discussing a paper refers to the presence of adrenalin in a metastatic tumor of the omentum primary in, the adrenal, but no very convincing experimental evidence is given. Negative results were obtained by Taddei (4) f rom some tests on a malignant hypernephroma removed from a boy eleven years of age. Suzuki (5) described in a man sixty-two years of age a tumor which appeared to consist of both medullary and cortical substances, but he gave no direct experiments on the adrenal content of either portion of the tumor. From the above it would seem that a chromaffin tumor can arise f rom medullary tissue, but not f rom cortical rests, which are the places of origin of t rue malignant hypernephromas. Such chromaffin tumors might well be expected to contain adrenalin, but thus far such a content has not been demonstrated. On the other hand, the ordinary malignant hypernephroma originat ing in cortical tissue has been tested and found to contain no adrenalin. The present note is a continuation of, and is supplementary to the paper by Greet and Wells. ORIGIN OF SPECIMENS.