Further Studies on Dietary Factors Associated with Nutritional Muscle Dystrophy

Dietary studies on the prevention or cure of nutritional muscular dystrophy in rabbits demonstrate clearly the multiple factor nature of this deficiency disease. All the essential factors are present in acetone extracts of wheat germ or cottonseed, though not in adequate amounts in the latter. Fresh green leaves of lettuce fed in large amounts with the basal diet can cure dystrophic rabbits and maintain them in good health for a long time. Whole wheat germ was fractionated into its fat-soluble and water-soluble components. Neither fraction by itself can either prevent or cure dystrophy. The fat-soluble material, or the non-saponifiable portion of it, incorporated into the basal diet delays the onset of dystrophy while the water-soluble fraction, either as the extract or as the residue left over from the extraction with petroleum ether, does not even affect the rapidity with which dystrophy develops on diet 13. However, when the two extracts are fed together to severely dystrophic rabbits they recover very quickly and grow vigorously. Many animals after they made good progress on these curative diets for long periods of time have had a remission of the disease. Since in every case there has been some pulmonary complication, the recurrence of dystrophy after the animals have been gaining steadily and behaved entirely normally even for months will need further investigation. Cures have been effected not only by combining wheat germ oil and the water-soluble fraction of wheat germ but also by combining the latter fraction with a petroleum ether extract of wheat germ or with its non-saponifiable fraction, as well as by combining the fat-soluble fraction with yeast or with different vitamin B concentrates. It may, therefore, be regarded as proved that one of the essential dietary factors is present in the non-saponifiable fraction of the wheat germ oil. The fact that this factor is absent in linseed oil but is found also in lettuce, cottonseed or corn oil, showing that its distribution is similar to that of vitamin E, and the fact that it is destroyed by the same treatment which destroys vitamin E indicate that both are either very closely associated or possibly even identical. Pappenheimer and Goettsch (’31) and Morgulis and Spencer (’36) found that muscle dystrophy in rabbits cannot be cured by vitamin E concentrates alone but, on the other hand, foods which prevent or cure this condition contain vitamin E. We have shown that a petroleum ether extract of wheat