THE BLOOD AND SPINAL FLUID SUGAR AND CHLORIDE CONTENT IN MENINGITIS BY

It has long been recognized that the cerebrospinal fluid contains glucose and chlorides and that in meningitis their amount is reduced. This is generally supposed to be of diagnostic importance in distinguishing meningitis from certain other diseases in which there is a meningeal reaction, such as acute anterior poliomyelitis. In the present paper a study of the sugar and chloride content of the cerebrospinal fluid from children suffering from conditions other than meningitis (control series) and from cases of meningitis has been made, and the results correlated with the sugar and chloride content of the blood. The control series consisted of seventeen cases with no organic meningeal disease and from whom lumbar puncture, performed for diagnostic purposes, yielded a normal cerebrospinal fluid. Care was taken to exclude all cases in which there had been convulsions, as these have been proved to cause a marked alteration in the blood sugar content (MacLean, 1936). Of the meningitis cases there were twenty-eight with tuberculous meningitis, fourteen with meningococcal, one with pneumococcal, two with B. coli, two with influenza