Uric acid as a factor in the causation of disease : a contribution to the pathology of high arterial tension, headache, epilepsy, mental depression, gout, rheumatism, diabetes, Bright's disease, and other disorders / by Alexander Haig.

  • Haig, Alexander, 1853-1924.
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Uric acid as a factor in the causation of disease : a contribution to the pathology of high arterial tension, headache, epilepsy, mental depression, gout, rheumatism, diabetes, Bright's disease, and other disorders / by Alexander Haig. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    27/290 (page 13)
    genous diet the formation of uric acid and urea were both much greater, urea being some 500 grs. per day, as against some 300 now, but it is obvious that a relative excretion of 1—20, on 500 grs., would give 10 grs. of uric acid to pass through the blood, but on 300 grs. only 6 grs. of uric acid would pass through it; hence it comes about that I now have a headache only once in three, six, or nine months, when several causes producing a temporary fluctuation in excretion, happen to act together; but formerly on a more nitrogenous diet I had one every week. And there is one other point requiring explanation. Taking the figures previously given I excreted 6,368 grs. of uric acid in the relation to urea of 1—30.5, but if I had excreted it in the relation 1—33 (the level of formation) I should only have excreted 5, 897 grs.—a difference of 4:66grs. It may be asked whether I think the whole of this 466 grs. of uric acid was washed out of my body by the lowered acidity of a vegetarian diet, and was not due to any extra formation of uric acid. I reply that probably my standard of formation, 1—33, is only relatively accurate, and that this may account for part of the difference ; but I should be quite prepared to believe that 200 or 300 grs. of uric acid had been washed out from the stores in my body in the time covered by these figures, and if I am correct, and if the vegetarian diet is continued, there will at last come a time when all the stores of uric acid in the body will be exhausted, and its excretion, observed over many con- secutive months, will be found to have sunk to the absolute level of formation, whatever that may be. I would here just remind my readers that if one grain of uric acid is held back in the body every day, nearly one ounce could be so provided in a year, and though in nature such a thing would rarely happen, the balance of retention and excre- tion over a series of years may tend either to increase the stores or to gradually diminish them. When the fluctuation balances tend in the direction of in- creasing the stores, and the relation in excretion for a long