Medicine: Hormones for Ulcers

When the digestive system begins to digest itself, the result is ulcers. Doctors have tried everything from soup substitutes to surgery, but have found no sure prevention or cure. Famed Physiologist Andrew Conway Ivy, vice president of the University of Illinois, has been experimenting for a dozen years or so with a hormone called enterogastrone, found in normal small intestines of men and animals. Finding that the hormone cured ulcers in animals, he began using it five years ago on human beings.

Last week, at the centennial celebration of Boston University School of Medicine, Dr. Ivy reported his findings to date. He has used the hormone (his own chemists scrape it from the small intestines of freshly killed hogs) on 46 ulcer patients. Before treatment, they averaged a little over three months between ulcers. After treatment, their average symptom-free period rose to a little over ten months; two patients have gone four years, nine months without ulcers; 40% for 2½ years; 17% got no better. His work, Dr. Ivy says, is still “research in progress,” not yet a proved cure. He still does not know just what there is in enterogastrone that makes it work. He is now giving it by mouth (14 to 28 pills a day) as well as by injection (six shots a week).

Other researchers have had less success. Three Detroit doctors reported last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association that they were stopping the use of enterogastrone on patients, but were continuing to study it in the laboratory.