MERCURIAL AND XANTHINE DIURETICS IN CHRONIC CONGESTIVE HEART FAILURE: A COMPARATIVE SURVEY

The present study was made possible by employing directly the daily weight of patients with cardiac disease—the simplest and yet most accurate means of following diuretic response, great or small. A number of the commonly used diuretics were administered to these patients, including some of the more recently popularized agents which contain the combination of a xanthine derivative with a mercurial. Before going into further details we would stress two points which seem to us of importance in consideration of previous studies on diuretics. First, most of the observations up to the present have necessarily been of relatively short duration (usually a matter of weeks) because of the time limitations placed on the hospitalization of all types of patients. Marvin, 1 in his studies on xanthine derivatives, emphasized the fact that his patients were under observation from only three weeks to a little over six weeks. The patients in our series