Treatment of Herpes Simplex with 5-Iodo-2′-deoxyuridine

Sera from 14 patients with Hashimoto's disease serologically and /or pathologically confirmed showed markedly raised immuno-conglutinin titre, distributed as in Fig. D. These were mostly cases with very high antibody titres (tanned red-cell test), and in view of the small size of this group no attempt was made to correlate the immuno-conglutinin and antithyroglobulin titres. The 22 patients with rheumatic disease (Figs. E and F) were divisible into those with true rheumatoid arthritis (11) and those with conditions such as osteogenic arthropathy, ankylosing spondylitis, etc. (11). The former of these two subgroups had a significantly higher conglutinin titre than the latter (P<O.01), but both differ significantly from normal (P<0.001). Tests on cerebrospinal fluids gave uniformly negative results. Discussioa Our normal distribution of immuno-conglutinin differs from that given by Marks and Coombs (1957) but corresponds more closely to some of their analyses for individual months. However, as both the normal controls' and the patients' sera were obtained at the same time it is perhaps justifiable to assume that the incidence of minor infection influencing the immunoconglutinin titre is the same in the two groups. To the primary question posed-namely, whether cases of multiple sclerosis show an elevated immunoconglutinin titre in the blood-we are able to elicit a definitely negative answer in both acute and chronic cases. This contrasted sharply with our findings in Hashimoto's disease, and the test thus gave similar results to the globulin-consumption test applied by Field and Ridley (1960) to these two diseases. The results obtained with sera from cases of Hashimoto's disease gave the results one would expect from a confirmed auto-antibody disorder; high immunoconglutinin levels were found in all cases we examined. It would be of interest to reinvestigate all these cases after varying periods of treatment to observe variations of immuno-conglutinin with depression of antibody titre and linical improvement. All cases of clinical rheumatic disease had a raised immuno-conglutinin level independent of the result of the Rose-Waaler test, and this may indicate some stimulus not detected by the common serological tests applied in rheumatoid disease.