Studies on neoplasms with the aid of radioactive phosphorus. I. The total phosphorus metabolism of normal and leukemic mice

In a previous study (1) using " tagged " phos-phorus,-it was found that lymphomatous mice handle a single dose of sodium phosphate in a manner different from normal animals. Lym-phomatous tissue absorbed or exchanged phos-phorus in greater degree than normal lymph nodes, and this seemed to occur at the expense of the uptake in bone in these animals. Before investigating this question further in leukemic animals, it seemed important first to determine the content of total phosphorus in vari-ous lymphomatous, leukemic and normal tissues. One might suspect that the greater exchange of phosphorus in lymphomatous tissue was related to a greater total phosphorus content. The analyses were carried out using the methods of Pregl (2) for total phosphorus. The animals were young adults of the Strong A strain (3), with males and females equally distributed between the normal and leukemic animals. Most of them were given the disease (4) by the intravenous injection of leukemic cells but a few were inoculated subcu-taneously, the latter method resulting in the ap-pearance of a local lymphoma followed later by the generalized disease. In all instances the ani-mals were killed by breaking the neck and the tissues were immediately weighed and prepared for phosphorus analysis. In all cases, gross evi-dence of generalized leukemia was found in the leukemic group. Examination of Table I reveals that there is no significant difference in the total phosphorus contents of leukemic spleens, leukemic lymph nodes, and leukemic bones2 when com-pared with the respective normal tissues, in spite of the fact that, in leukemic animals, all of these tissues are infiltrated with leukemic cells. Like-wise, the values for skeletal muscle are the sam