Treatment of hypersplenism An experimental study in the rat.

Methylcellulose injected intraperitoneally into rats proved to give a splenomegaly combined with anemia and thrombocytopenia. The white blood cell count did not change during the treatment. The splenic parenchyma of the hypersplenic rats was then reduced by resection or splenic artery ligation to a different extent. The peripheral blood cell count was normalized after a one-third resection, whereas a more-than-two-thirds reduction of the splenic parenchyma caused infective complications in many rats. It was thus possible to treat the 'secondary hypersplenism' in the rat by a partial reduction of the splenic parenchyma and to avoid total splenectomy, much undesired with new immunologic knowledge.