USE OF CHOLINE SUPPLEMENTS IN FATTY METAMORPHOSIS OF THE LIVER: A Needle Biopsy Investigation in Human Beings

ALLAN and his co-workers¹ observed that depancreatized dogs kept alive with insulin acquired fatty livers and that the change was preventable by the oral administration of raw beef pancreas. Hershey² and Hershey and Soskin³ later reported that lecithin could be substituted for raw beef pancreas. In 1932, Best and his associates⁴ identified choline as the active principle in lecithin. Choline is effective in preventing experimentally produced cirrhosis in laboratory animals, as has been shown by György and Goldblatt⁵ and others.⁶ The successful therapeutic use of choline in human cirrhosis has been reported in several communications.⁷ Patek⁸ and others,⁹ however, pointed out factors in these investigations, such as the absence of control patients, insufficient control periods in the patients treated and the small number of patients observed, which make their evaluation hazardous. Recently, the use of the needle biopsy of the liver has made possible histological, as