A family is described in which 2 siblings born to healthy parents presented with abnormal facies, persistent diarrhoea, and early death. Exhaustive pathological and biochemical investigations failed to find a cause. The scalp hair of both babies had an abnormal amino-acid composition, and presented an appearance that was unique on scanning electron microscopical examination; this fact and the clinical picture probably represents a new syndrome.

To study the effects on the fetus of variations in maternal glucose tolerance, a 25 g rapid intravenous glucose tolerance test was performed at or about 32 weeks gestation in 917 randomly selected nondiabetic women with singleton pregnancies. The results were withheld from the patients and their obstetricians and paediatricians, and no treatment or advice was offered. Fasting plasma glucose and indices of glucose disposal (including a new index which we have termed "summed glucose") were distributed unimodally, with no evidence of a separate pathological group towards the diabetic end of the distributions. Significant associations were found between maternal glucose metabolism and various measures of neonatal nutrition and morbidity, including the incidence of congenital malformations and morbidity related to asphyxia, suggesting that variations within the normal range in maternal glucose metabolism can influence growth and development in the fetus. These relationships were continuous throughout the range of maternal glucose tolerance and were not of predictive value in individual cases.

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SUMMARY Stool fluid has been obtained for analysis by homogenization and high speed centrifugation of fresh stool.This fluid, from two healthy individuals with soft stools has been compared with stool dialysate obtained in vivo by retrieval of swallowed dialysis bags from their stools. Stool fluid was more acid, with a higher osmolality, an increased concentration of organic anions, sugar and ammonia, and a lower bicarbonate concentration than dialysate in vivo. It is suggested that in the individuals studied, dialysate in vivo may not be in equilibrium with the stool fluid surrounding it, and may not represent a true dialysate of faecal water.The investigation of the composition of stool poses a number of difficult problems. Stool is a multiphasic system containing solid material, colloidal solutions of both sol and gel varieties and true crystalloid solutions. The solutes in true solution within the stool may be sequestered into two or more separate compartments.Early techniques for the investigation of the composition of stool involved acid digestion or ashing, with subsequent chemical analysis. These techniques are obviously of limited applicability, they do not differentiate between material in solid or liquid phases of stool, and can only be applied to minerals resistant to these drastic physical or chemical techniques.In 1961, an elegant technique for dialysis in vivo of stool was introduced by Wrong and his coworkers (Wrong, Morrison, and Hurst, 1961). This involved subjects swallowing bags made of cellulose acetate dialysis tubing, closed at both ends and containing a small amount of an oncotic agent. These bags were recovered from the stool, and it was assumed that the contents represented 'the extracellular component of faecal water'. Slyke and Neill (1924); organic anions by a modification of the method of Van Slyke and Palmer (1920) using a pH meter and microelectrode; total sugar by a modification of the copper reduction technique described by Somogyi (1952); individual sugars by semiquantitative thin-layer chromatography on silica gel (Baron and Economidis, 1963); total stool water by drying a homogenized aliquot to constant weight at 100°C; and osmolality by freezing-point depression using an Advanced osmometer.