Effects of hypervitaminosis A on foetal mouse bones cultivated in vitro : preliminary communication / by Honor B. Fell and Sir Edward Mellanby.

  • Fell, Honor B.
Date:
[1950?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Effects of hypervitaminosis A on foetal mouse bones cultivated in vitro : preliminary communication / by Honor B. Fell and Sir Edward Mellanby. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Reprinted from the British Medical Journai September 2, 1950, vol ii, p. 535 EFFECTS OF HYPERVITAMINOSIS A ON FOETAF MOUSE BONES CULTIVATED IN VITRO PRELIMINARY COMMUNICATION BY HONOR B. FELL, D.Sc. Foulerton Research Fellow, Royal Society {From the Strangeways Research Laboratory, Cambridgey AND Sir EDWARD MELLANBY, G.B.E., K.C.B., M.D., F.R.C.P., F.R.S. (From the Nutrition Building, National Institute for Medical Research, London, N.W.7) It was shown in 1938 that vitamin A has the remarkable property of controlling the shape and texture of certain bones in young animals, so that when it is deficient or absent from the body these bones grow abnormally (Mellanby, 1938). The effect of this loss of ability of vitamin-A-deficient animals to control the shape and texture of bone is that the growing bones fail to adapt themselves to the developing nervous tissue and often destroy the nerves, both peripheral and central, by pressure. It was later shown that this dysplasia of bone is due to the fact that vitamin A has the function of controlling the position and intensity of activity of osteoclasts and osteoblasts (Mellanby, 1944). In some places normal osteoclastic and osteoblastic activity in growing bone of vitamin-A-deficient animals was reversed, so that where bone ought to have been removed it was laid down and vice versa, with disastrous effects on the nervous system. The restoration of vitamin A to the defective diets brought back the osteo¬ clastic and osteoblastic activity to the normal position and the bone to a nearer normal shape. The question was asked in the 1943 Croonian Lecture at the Royal Society whether this action of vitamin A was direct on the bones, or indirect by an action on some inter¬ mediary organ or humoral mechanism, and it was pointed out that an answer to this question could probably be 519/50