Short-Term Hormone Therapy

IN 1949 when ACTH became available, we considered that we could best evaluate hormone therapy by selecting patients observed at the onset of carditis before irreversible damage was sustained, and that the duration of therapy should be significantly less than the usual duration of this self-limited disease.1 In a previous report of the effect of short-term hormone therapy in 55 patient attacks of active carditis of three to twenty-one days' duration, it was demonstrated that in the majority of patients, early adequate therapy for an average period of seven days resulted in no overt residual cardiac damage. Patients were ambulatory . . .