Gray hair? Balding? Hair that's thin, limp, and lifeless? The answer to these problems of life and aging is that magic member of the B-complex, pantothenic acid. At least that's what we are told by the advertisements in the health food stores and in vitamin catalogs. Eat it, drink it, shampoo with it; we don't care, just buy our pantothenic acid and have thicker, fuller, stronger, more pliable, healthier hair.KeywordsPantothenic AcidTrue FitnessGray HairHealth Food StoreCost DietThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
3 female albino rats were trained to press a lever for a food reinforcement on a fixed ratio schedule. When a stationary light source flickered at 100 cps, the rats could obtain reinforcement contingent upon 10 responses. When stimulus lights flashed at frequencies of 20, 50, 70, or 100 cps, the rats were not rewarded. These two conditions controlled the animals' behavior so as to require them to respond only when the light was steady (100 cps). Increased flicker frequency, between 2 and 100 cps, in the S Δ condition, provided a discriminative task. There was a linear decrease in efficiency of discrimination as the frequency of flicker increased. The reliability of the albino rat's behavior in physiologically and pharmacologically oriented cff investigations is discussed.
Sent to study planet earth, an extraterrestrial being might reach an odd conclusion about the diseases that afflict the citizens of the United States. To be sure, cancer and heart disease kill most, and AIDS, though totally preventable, causes great anxiety. But analysis of our newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, together with a monitoring of the thoughts of American men and women, would suggest that our major concern is body weight. In toting up the numbers, our visitor would find that, at any given moment, three- quarters of the female members of the population are too heavy and are "on a diet." The males are a little different; up until the age of 25 or so, many actively try to gain weight, but then they too begin to diet, though seldom with the ferocity of the female of the species.
It is known that the effects of mescaline (3,4,5-trimethoxyphenylethylamine), a hallucinogen, can function as a discriminative stimulus. The present investigation examined the ability of 3,4-dimethoxyphenylethylamine (DMPEA), a non-hallucinogen, to substitute for mescaline in animals previously trained with mescaline and saline. Subjects were first trained on a variable interval schedule of positive reinforcement Two treatment conditions, mescaline hydrochloride (10 mg/kg) and saline, were then assigned to each animal. One treatment was SD, the stimulus in whose presence responses were reinforced, and the other treatment was SΔ, the stimulus in whose presence no responses were reinforced. After approximately 10 sessions in which the drug treatments were alternated on successive days, a punishment contingency was added, i.e. , in the presence of SΔ, responses were punished by the delivery of electric shock. The efficacy of the drug treatments as discriminative stimuli was established in test sessions in which responses were neither punished nor reinforced. Subsequent administration of a range of doses of DMPEA to subjects in which saline functioned as SD and mescaline as SΔ revealed that a dose of 10 to 30 mg/kg of DMPEA was equivalent to the training dose of mescaline. However, the same range of doses, when tested in subjects in which mescaline was SD did not result in responding appropriate for the mescaline condition. Subsequently, direct comparisons of DMPEA and mescaline were made by substituting DMPEA for saline 1) in subjects previously trained with mescaline and saline and 2) in a second group which had previously received neither drugs nor behavioral training. Discriminated responding developed rapidly in both groups. The present results suggest that DMPEA cannot substitute for mescaline in a discriminative task and that comparable doses of the two drugs are discriminable in rats.
—In a recent report in theArchivesMay1described a patient in whom sensory neuronopathy developed after one month's maintenance on a parenteral solution that contained no lipid. Recovery occurred soon after reinstitution of enteral alimentation. Potential causative factors that were ruled out in this, or previously reported, similar cases include heavy metal intoxication, porphyria, vitamin B12deficiency, hypothyroidism, and neurosyphilis. The possible role of a deficiency of linolenic acid seems not to have been considered. The essentialness of certain unsaturated fatty acids in the human diet was generally accepted following the studies in infants by Hansen et al in the early 1960s.2However, there remained uncertainty as to their number; standard textbooks usually list linoleic acid, arachidonic acid, and linolenic acid. Of these, linoleic acid has been thought to be the only truly essential fatty acid (EFA) because (1) linoleate reverses the dermatologic signs
