Leukemia and Hepatic Function

Part II. Hepatic Function in Leukemia-Bearing Rats

Abstract

Experiment I: Both 18 70-day old and 15 29-day old male rats of the Sprague-Dawley JCL strain were administered TMBA 30mg/kg i. v. four times fortnightly. In 15 out of the 18 “effective” rats (i. e. those survived longer than four months after the first injection of TMBA),7 lymphatic,6 myelogenous, and 2 unclassified leukemia or subleukemic states were induced, while none of the 15 nontreated control rats yielded leukemia.
Experiment II: Both 4 male and 5 female 63-day old rats and 6 fem ale and 5 male 28-day old rats of the Long-Evans strain were treated with DMBA 30mg/kg i. v. four times fortnightly. All four females out of the 7 effective rats yielded leukemic states of the erythroblast ic type. In addition, one case of lymphocytic leukemia was found among the 5 Sprague-Dawley males treated intragastrically with 0.72mg of DMBA 6 times a week in the age between 50-78 days and and another case of lymphocytic leukemia spontaneously occurred in an old male Wistar rat.
In compariso n with 22 untreated controls and non-leukemically treated rats, the animals bearing chemically induced leukemia showed the following abnormalities: 1) anemia (RBC less than 2.5 million, hemoglobin content less than 30%) 2) thrombocytopenia (less than 100,000) 3) many atypical blood cells in the peripheral blood 4) loss of body weight and hepatosplenomegaly (average relative weight per body weight: liver 3.37%, spleen 0.38%)5) various degrees of leukemic cell colonization in the bone marrow, liver, spleen, lymph nodes, etc.
In ord er to check the hepatic function of the hosts, the sera were examined for the enzymic activity of GOT, GPT, and alkaline phosphatase, total protein content, and the A/G ratio: Severe hypoproteinemia and a slight elevation of seral GPT were commonly observed in the leukemic animals. A fall in A/G and an elevation in alkaline phosphatase were also detected in the leukemic Sprague-Dawley rats, but not in the Long-Evans rats. This last finding did not seem to be strain-specific, but rather to be dependent on the leukemic states. It was of interest that high alkaline phosphatase activity was frequently observed among SD rats with diffuse leukemic cell infiltration of moderate grade into the hepatic lobules.