Oral and Intravenous Dextrose Tolerance Curves of Patients With Manicdepressive Psychosis

There are many reports in the literature demonstrating wide variations in oral dextrose tolerance curves for "normal" persons.¹Similar variations when found in mentally ill patients continue to be called abnormal in the psychiatric literature.²McFarland and Goldstein³have reviewed most of the older literature, and such a survey will not be repeated here. Recently Lozner, Winkler, Taylor and Peters1ahave reemphasized the variations in oral dextrose curves and suggested that much of the controversy concerning tolerance for carbohydrate in specific diseases would be resolved if a standard intravenous test were universally adopted. The present report is concerned with a reinvestigation of the values for intravenous dextrose tolerance curves of 30 patients with manic-depressive psychosis. For 19 of these patients a comparison of the curves following the oral and the intravenous administration of dextrose has been made. METHODS AND MATERIAL The procedure for the intravenous dextrose