Cliniceal Significance of Successive Estimation of the Blood Catalase Activity in the Cancer Patient during Surgical and Anti-cancer Drug Therapy

Abstract

Estimating both the blood and liver catalase activities at the same time in the same animals, we found some correlations between the change of the blood catalase activity and that of liver catalase activity in tumor- bearing animals, and then pursued clinically the interrelation between the change of the blood catalase activity and the effect of surgery on cancer patients.
The average value of the blood catalase activity in 82 cancer patients was significantly low as compared with the value of non-cancerous individuals. We found that the cancer patients whose value of blood catalase activity had not risen after surgery, had recurrence of the cancer at an early time, even though curative resection had been carried out macroscopically; and in the cases with manifest improvement of the value of blood catalase activity after surgery, the clinical signs of recurrence mostly could not be seen until the declining tendency of the blood catalase activity became evident.
Thus, if the cancer lesion is not too small, the successive estimation of the blood catalase activity at the time of surgery of cancer patients may assist in determining the effects of the surgery.