MEDICAL DISCOVERY

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22046, 28 February 1935, Page 11

MEDICAL DISCOVERY

NERVES OF HUMAN BODY BRITISH RESEARCH RESULTS LONDON, Feb. 26 Sir Henry Dale, director, and his colleagues, of the National Institute of Medical Research, have made remarkable discoveries of the nervous mechanism of the body. They have proved that electric impulses are transmitted from the brain through the nerves to the muscles, and that they release a substance which controls the complicated chemistry of the body. One set of nerve fibres releases an elusive substance called acetylcholine. Another set of fibres releases a chemical like adrenalin, the drug which restarts the heart when a • patient is presumably dead. The research helps to explain the action of drugs on the nervous system, and is linked up with the effects of vitamin B in cases of nervous disorders. An Auckland medical authority said yesterday that further particulars of the reported discovery would be awaited with interest. It promised to be of value as correlating certain existing knowledge on the subject. The existence of electrical impulses in the nervous mechanism of the body had long been known to medical science, and also that adrenalin is produced in parts of the body other than the adrenal gland. It was known also that acetylcholine had the effect of dilating the blood vessels while adrenalin contracts them, and these drugs were used accordingly for medical purposes. Apparently experimenters now said that the way in which these processes worked was by the local production of these chemicals in the body.