THE CLINICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF LYMPHOID HYPERPLASIA OF THE APPENDIX

In the course of the past fifteen years, one of us, working in the pathologic laboratories at the New York and Bellevue Hospitals, has been almost daily impressed by the fact that, of all appendixes removed at operation, a very considerable number revealed no noteworthy microscopic alterations other than lymphoid hyperplasia, with or without the association of moderate sclerotic changes in the connective tissues. Signs of inflammatory exudation in the appendix were missing, and yet the patients had been subjected to operation because of definite symptoms of appendical disturbances of a subacute or chronic nature. With the exception of a paper by Barss,¹ to whom full credit should be given for first calling attention to the significance of these changes, the literature on the subject appears to be silent. Barss removed seven such appendixes at operation, all of them from children under the age of 14. In our records