SOME EXPERIENCES WITH ACTH-TREATMENT IN DISSEMINATED SCLEROSIS

Abstract

ACTH-treatment of disseminated sclerosis was first attempted in Scandinavia in 1949 in Professor Sahlgren’s department in Södersjukhuset in Stockholm (Jönsson et al., 1949). The treatment was made the object of a brief discussion at the Congress of Scandinavian Neurologists in Copenhagen in August 1950. Results from this country were extremely few at the time and were not favourable, so that a continuation of the experiments was not encouraged. The treatment seems to have had the same fate abroad, from where only occasional communications arrive. So far only a single fairly large material consisting of eleven patients from Glaser et al. (1951) is available. Among these eleven cases seven showed a significant improvement during the treatment. After the Congress of Neurologists, however, a case was presented which showed such a striking change in the clinical picture (Case 3 in this paper) that the question seemed to call for closer investigation.