Treatment of sarcoidosis by old tuberculin, blood and BCG. I. Results.

Treatment of sarcoidosis by subcutaneous injections of a mixture of old tuberculin and blood of a highly tuberculin sensitive donor of an appropriate bloodgroup and by additional vaccination with BCG is described. All patients exhibiting x-ray stage I of the disease were cured without any relapse. The evaluation of these results as being due to our therapy is difficult, because of high frequency of spontaneous healing, however, during our treatment of the patients we never observed a progression of this stage into a more severe one. Of 60 patients exhibiting sarcoidosis of x-ray stage II and III treated by us, 54 were cured within an average time of therapy of 28 months as judged by clinical and x-ray parameters including 8 cases with sarcoidosis stage III, who at the end of the therapy showed only some residual scars, 5 of the 6 patients who did not respond to the therapy, had been unsuccessfully treated with corticosteroids before, or suffered from concomitant disease like extrinsic allergic alveolitis. In contrast to other methods of treating sarcoidosis, during our therapy we did not observe any harmful side effects.