Experiences with a rat bio-assay in the diagnosis of the Zollinger-Ellison syndrome.

Reported here are the assay results, using the anaesthetized rat preparation of Lai (1964), of plasma from patients known or suspected to have peptide-secreting adenomata and these are compared with assays carried out on plasma from patients whose clinical history excluded such pathology. It is suggested that these demonstrate that this technique is of diagnostic value in this condition and that it has practical advantages over other bio-assay methods currently available and physiological advantages over immunological methods. It may well be that identification of the presence of tumour in these patients may first be made by immunological techniques to be followed by functional identification using a bioassay procedure such as is described here.