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Exhibit Features

Hungarian Americans of Cleveland

Newspaper Articles from The Cleveland Press Archive

When a solid tumor cannot be reduced by radiation, it may respond to a combination of drugs and radio-therapy.

A progress report on such a drug was presented here yesterday to the newly organized Hungarian Medical Association of American, by Dr. Julian Ambrus, of Roswell Park Memorial Institute, Buffalo, N. Y.

The chemical, code-tagged AB132, has been used on abut 175 persons with lung cancer in the last eight years. All were near death and could not be treated by surgery or drugs alone. In the most recent study, 40 such patients were treated with intensive doses of radiation; quantities high enough to produce toxic reactions. All died within three years.

ANOTHER 40 received daily injections of AB132 for two or three weeks before being exposed to radiation. Four survived for three years or more; two are still alive, eight years later. Much better results could be expected, Dr. Ambrus indicated, if less critically ill patients had been selected. This probably will be the next phase of investigation.

He said the drug's side effects appear confined to the nervous system, producing LSD-like dreams at night, and (in does higher than those used clinically) convulsions. The drug was synthesized by Thomas Bardos, also of Buffalo.

Intensive chemotherapy is needed for "crisis intervention" in treating the mentally ill, said Dr. Gusztav A. Batizy, an Akron psychiatrist on the staff of the Brecksville Veterans Administration Hospital.

DRUG NEED to be given long enough to calm the patient and to make it possible for the psychiatrist to break through the crisis barrier. They are not enough, Dr. Batizy emphasized; the patient may be out of danger, but he is still not happy.

Therefore, drug therapy is followed by three or four weeks of individual and group treatment. When the patient is symptom-free and sufficiently motivated to seek further care, he is released from the hospital as quickly as possible.

"Keeping a patient hospitalized for three or four years is ridiculous," Dr. Batizy said. "It works against the limited therapy patients usually receive in such situations."

Commenting on the slow development of "crisis intervention centers," Dr. Batizy said the problem of enlisting psychiatrists for such work soon would be solved. More serious, he suggested, may be the problem of financing such programs in community mental health centers and general hospitals.



Dr. George Vareska, Maple Heights pathologist, is the first president of the new medical organization. Dr. Batizy is secretary, and Dr. Rudolf Bognar, of East Cleveland, treasurer.