Amino-acid content of serum in rheumatoid arthritis

1960), it was found that an amino-acid mixture had a stimulating effect upon erythropoiesis in the in vitro cultivation of bone marrow. This effect was more pronounced on bone marrow from cases of rheumatoid arthritis than on marrow from patients with other diseases. A possible inter-pretation of this result is that there is a lack of free amino acids in serum from cases of rheumatoid arthritis. On the basis of this finding, a study was under-taken of the amino-acid content of the serum in cases of rheumatoid arthritis, and to this end methods have been devised which permit the deter-mination of seventeen different amino acids with relatively satisfactory reliability