578 



Ascorbic Acid Subnutrition 



For further treatment of the data, the capillary fragility was expressed in 

 numerical values as follows: normal = o, slightly increased fragility = i, and 

 definitely increased fragility =2; definitely decreased fragility ^—2. The 

 changes during the experiment were, accordingly, expressed by values ranging 

 from —2 to -\-2. The observed changes are shown in table 2. There is a small 

 improvement in the group given ascorbic acid, but the change is too small to 

 have statistical significance. 



TABLE 2 

 Changes of Capillary Fragility in all Children 



* Standard error. 



Now, one might be inclined to assume that the circumstance that the groups 

 consisted of a large proportion of children having normal capillary resistances 

 may have overshadowed any possible effects of the treatment on the "deficient" 

 children. Therefore it seemed worth while to examine the results after ex- 

 clusion of the normal children. When the changes taking place in the capillary 

 status of the originally "deficient" children were segregated from the data 

 presented in figure 1 and the data treated in a way similar to that shown in 

 table 2, the following values were obtained: the average changes were —0.82 ± 

 0.2 1 (S.E.) fragility units in the treated group and —0.68 ± 0.15 units in the 

 control group. Thus there was a substantial improvement in both groups. It 

 seemed to be greater in the group treated with ascorbic acid, but the difference 

 between the groups (0.14 ± 0.26 units) was again too small to be statistically 

 significant. 



Consequently, the results of this experiment do not permit the conclusion 



that treatment with ascorbic acid had materially improved the capillary 



resistance. 



Discussion and Conclusions 



It is clear from the foregoing that there exists a correlation between the as- 

 corbic acid content of the diet and capillary fragility. The latter may be con- 

 sidered to be some kind of a measure of the former. The correlation is, however, 



