Tobacco Sensitization in Rats

Friedlander, Silbert and Laskey 1 reported the occurrence of gangrene of the toes in male albino rats injected daily with denicotinized tobacco by the intraabdominal route. In order to elucidate the nature of these lesions it was deemed important to determine whether the tissues of the animals thus injected had been sensitized to tobacco. We therefore repeated their experiments and, having confirmed their observations, selected those animals in whom we had succeeded in reproducing the lesions described by Friedlander, et al., for this investigation.

The present report deals with results obtained by testing intestinal strips of 6 injected animals and 5 controls.

Of the 6 treated animals one was injected with tobacco only; 4 with horse serum, eggwhite, and tobacco; and one with ragweed only. Injections were given daily until the toelesions appeared. This usually occurred in 6 to 10 weeks. After the appearance of gangrene, injections were stopped for about 10 days and the animal sacrificed for our experiments. The extracts used in injecting the animals represented a mixture of tobaccos prepared from the cured leaves of Burley, Maryland, Virginia and Xanthis tobaccos, denicotinized and extracted according to a technic previously described. 2 This extract contained 0.085 mg. N per cc. The ragweed-pollen extract contained 0.42 mg. N per cc.; the eggwhite 1.2 mg. N per cc. The horse serum was furnished by the Board of Health and used in undiluted form. The amount of the total material injected never exceeded one cc.

The animal to be studied was killed by a blow on the head and about one inch of the duodenum or intestine excised. This was suspended in a bath containing 75 cc. of oxygenated Tyrode's solution.