Metabolic, Hormonal and Enzymatic Functions of Rats during Recovery from Injury

Abstract

In our experiments on adult male rats Noble-Collip drum trauma (16) in doses not exceeding 400 revolutions in 6 min 40 sec was used. The general response of the animals may be divided into two parts. The first is observed during drumming and therefore lasts only a few minutes, whereas the second begins with the termination of the injury and lasts several hours or days (1,6). An important aspect of this first response, an increased rate of disappearance of blood glucose, becomes immediately apparent when rats starved for 18 or 24 hr are injured. In such animals during injury there are increases in blood pyruvate and lactate, and nearly total depletion of glycogen stores. These events should lead to hyperglycaemia; but exactly the reverse, hypoglycaemia, regularly occurs (12,18). Intravenous glucose tolerance tests devised for use during traumatization fully confirmed the increase in the disappearance rate of blood glucose (13). This increase does not only take place in starved animals, but is also observed in fed rats, in which a substantial increase in the arterial venous glucose difference takes place (Table 1).