Macroglobulinemia: Report of Two Cases

drome? " In it he described three patients with refractory anemia and bleeding tendency whose sera exhibited a very high viscosity. Walden-strom speculated that a special globulin fraction was the cause of the in-creased viscosity, and by ultracentrifugation studies he was able to demon-strate that the sera of two of these patients contained macroglobulins with molecular weights of over 1,000,000.1 Since then other reports have been published, mostly from Europe, of single cases or small series, with a similar clinical picture and the presence of macroglobulins in the serum. Macroglobulinemia is a chronic disease characterized by a greatly in-creased erythrocyte sedimentation rate, elevated serum globulin fraction due to the presence of globulins of unusually high molecular weights, ill-defined systemic symptoms, and various hematologic and hemorrhagic manifesta-tions.2 ' 3 It occurs most commonly in elderly males.3 The following case reports present two patients exhibiting the macro-globulinemic phenomenon, with necropsy findings in one. We believe these