THE SUGAR CONTENT OF THE CEREBROSPINAL FLUID AND ITS RELATION TO THE BLOOD SUGAR

Abstract

During the last four years, the prevalence of encephalitis with its attendant diagnostic difficulties has brought out the importance of the quantitative determination of sugar in the spinal fluid. Kraus and Pardee¹ state that they found this the one finding of any positive value in a large percentage of spinal fluids from encephalitic patients. Because of the stress laid on this point in the literature, we started making routine sugar determinations on the spinal fluids in all cases in which the possibility of encephalitis was considered (Table 2), but we soon found that we had no way of knowing whether the figure obtained for the sugar content of the spinal fluid was normal. The literature gave us no help because of the great variation in the figures given for the normal sugar content in spinal fluid. We therefore undertook a study of the sugar content of the cerebrospinal fluid with