Word: dpp
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Researcher Akerfeldt is clearly over that hurdle: in a jampacked meeting last week U.S. researchers said that they had duplicated his method with minor variations, adding a chemical called DPP (for N,N-dimethyl-p-phenylene diamine) to serum specimens and getting the red reaction from patients with serious mental illnesses and some other diseases. (One notable exception: patients who have had schizophrenia a long time.) Most promising positive use: the reaction seems to be clearest in children, whose emotional disorders are especially hard to diagnose-and who are not likely to have such misleading conditions as malaria or pregnancy...
More important than whether the reaction can be used as a test is the question of why it occurs at all. On this, Biochemist Akerfeldt shed some new light. What Akerfeldt's DPP reacts to is a copper-containing enzyme, ceruloplasmin, present in the blood. It had been assumed that there must be more of this enzyme in schizophrenic than in normal blood. Not so, said Akerfeldt: the reaction measures not the amount but the activity of ceruloplasmin, and this activity depends at least to some extent on the presence of a second substance which he has not identified...