Committee on Problems of Alcohol: A Report of Its Activities From 1949 to 1955, the Research Work It Has Supported and the Place of This Work in the Field of Alcoholism (1956)

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-18- He has observed that the rats which took some of their calories as alcohol did not grow as rapidly as control rats receiving diets with the same calorie content but without alcohol. In longer-term experiments in which both the alcohol-fed rats and their controls were given diets very low in choline, it was observed that the alco- hol-fed rats developed increased liver fat much more rapidly than did their controls, but in the long run both groups:developed about equally fatty livers, Dr. Mallov has also observed that the adrenals of his.chronically in- toxicated rats are enlarged, and that rats who«e adrenals have been removed • ; do not develop fatty livers from alcohol. .He plans to investigate further the manner in which the various endocrine glands influence the deposition of fat in the liver. :; ..r . ,;• ..,-, , VIII. OTHER WORK SUPPORTED.1.'" . ...,'•: .^ ...'...;, ,; .' Work has been supported also in other areas related to alcoho?J.sm. .In view of the considerable usage of disulfiram (Antabuse) in the treatment of chronic alcoholism, a grant was made to Dr. H.• Hoick of the College of Pharmacy of the University of Nebraska, for the study'of .the effects of disul* firam on the growth rate, fertility, and length of life of the white rat. .The initial experiments used amounts of Antabuse in the rat's diet equivalent to . 5 to 10 times the normal human daily dose. "' ' ' i ,. At these high levels definite deleterious effects were noted on both growth and fertility, with questionable effects on life span. . . . •. When rats were fed dosages more nearly equal to those used in clinical medicine no significant harmful effect on either growth or'fertility could be detected, although the number of rats used in the fertility study was too small to permit the drawing of definite conclusions* ..,'.-. One other project supported by the Committee on Problems of Alcohol illus- trates well the impossibility of confining research rigidly to one specific field. The findings, although not pertinent to alcoholism, are of very defi- nite scientific interest. :••v . .... ' Dr. V. A. Najjar of The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore was given a grant in 1952 to investigate the following hypothesis. It had been shown . that certain bacteria, if raised in a medium containing large amounts of a given.substance, would develop large amounts of the enzyme needed to metabo- lize this substance. Dr. Majjar therefore wondered if rats fed large amounts of alcohol over a prolonged period would develop increased amounts of the alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme in their livers. His first group of rats did just the opposite; their liver alcohol dehydrogenase dropped strikingly as com- pared with normal controls.' He attempted to repeat this observation with other groups of rats and also with mice, but was unable to obtain similar results.