Substitution of Whole Stomach Extract for Vitamins in the Treatment of Malignant Infantile Pellagra

Abstract

DURING the last three years, close on three hundred children suffering from acute malnutrition have been admitted to the non-European Hospital, Johannesburg. More than 60 per cent of these infants manifested the clinical signs of infantile pellagra. The dominating features of this disease were œdema affecting upper and lower extremities, and in severe cases the face, eyelids and genitalia; this cadema was associated with pellagrous skin lesions on the legs, buttocks, back, arms and face, grey hair or alopecia, as well as patchy or diffuse dermal depig-mentation. The stools were, as a rule, bulky, pale and foul-smelling, and contained much unsplit fat. The serum proteins, both albumen and globulin, were extremely low, a mild microcytic anaemia was common, and the liver, on biopsy and at post-mortem, was diffusely fatty. This severe form of malnutrition is apparently identical with that described by other investigators^1,2,3,4.