BARRIER BETWEEN THE BLOOD AND CEREBROSPINAL FLUID

Abstract

Within the last few years the investigation of the passage of substances from the blood into the cerebrospinal fluid and the ratio of distribution of these in the two fluids has attracted a great deal of attention. In the psychiatric literature this increase in interest has undoubtedly been due largely to the discovery of the occurrence of consistent characteristic changes in this ratio in schizophrenia. This discovery has been made possible by the development of a new method of procedure that was devised by Walter. The methods hitherto used, although different in many respects, had two main difficulties to contend with: 1. Some of the methods (the hemolysin test of Weil and Kafka, and the trypan blue and kongo red methods of L. Stern) were based on the demonstration of substances which entered the spinal fluid in certain pathologic cases only. Naturally, this excluded all possibility of discovering instances