Medicine: Screening the Skulls

If a psychiatrist could look inside his patients’ skulls at will, he would rarely expect to see anything that would help him in treating their mental ills. Yet a radiologist urged last week that X rays be made routinely of the skulls of patients admitted to mental hospitals. His point: psychiatrists and other doctors might be surprised at what they find.

Reporting to the American Roentgen Ray Society, Dr. Ernest Kraft revealed that X rays of 1,000 patients arriving at the VA hospital in Northport, N.Y. revealed eleven tumors of the pituitary gland, which can upset the body’s hormone balance so severely as to cause both physical and mental illness. In similar surveys, said Dr. Kraft, other radiologists detected tumors of the brain covering that had gone unsuspected during months or years of psychiatric treatment. The tumors can usually be removed surgically, with good chances of relieving the emotional disturbances of which they are the indirect cause.

Also indirect but far more puzzling was a surprising finding by Radiologist Kraft. Patients who had never before been in a mental hospital were divided into two groups, psychotic and nonpsychotic. Among the psychotics were no fewer than 46% with evidence of enlarged pituitary glands, as against only 21% of the non-psychotics. This finding tells nothing yet about the origin or probable course of the patients’ illnesses, Dr. Kraft emphasized. But the obvious next step is to examine the hormone balance of the mental patients, correct it if necessary, then see whether this makes psychiatric treatment more effective.