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Genetic or Acquired?

RICHARD A. MacDONALD, MD

Arch Intern Med. 1963;112(2):184-190.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

A tentative suggestion was made 36 years ago by Sheldon ¹ that hemochromatosis might be a genetic disease. This idea has since been accepted with increasing firmness until it may now appear as temerity even to question it. Yet when all the facts are examined the conclusion is inescapable to me that hemochromatosis is an acquired condition.

Two early assumptions set our thinking about hemochromatosis off on the wrong foot. The first was that it was a disease suigeneris,^2,3 the result of pancreatic, liver, or hematologic disease, without considering fully its relationship to portal cirrhosis. Because of this assumption an interesting bibliography has accumulated in which certain phenomena have been reported to be peculiar to hemochromatosis, such as abdominal pain,⁴ heart disease,⁵ and labile diabetes, but such reports have been without controls. The second assumption was that the diet of afflicted persons contained normal or . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
BOSTON

Assistant Professor of Pathology, Harvard Medical School; Associate Pathologist, Mallory Institute of Pathology.

From the Mallory Institute of Pathology, Boston City Hospital, and the Department of Pathology, Harvard Medical School.

Footnotes
Received for publication Feb 18, 1963; accepted Feb 20.

Aided by grants C-5313, C-4119, and A-1519 from the US Public Health Service.

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