Analysis of Pure Ammonium Chloride in Tumor Diagnosis

Ammonium chloride, as a strong acid and weak base salt, has been widely used in cough, diuretic, acid-base adjustment and other traditional Chinese medicine treatments. Professor Pan Xianzhu, who is Anhui Medical College ,and others have found it through continuous experiments. Ammonium chloride is a new method for tumor diagnosis of cancer cells, which enriches the diagnostic methods of tumor cells.

It is well known that exfoliative cytology is an important method for the diagnosis of tumor, but the red blood cells in the blood pleural and abdominal fluid will cover up the tumor cells, which will make it difficult for the cancer cells to find out, resulting in the low detection rate of cancer cells and the easily missing diagnosis in clinic. Adding some chemical reagents to the blood pleural and abdominal effusion can get rid of red blood cells, but it is easy to change the morphology of other cells, especially the structure of cancer cells is not clear enough, which makes the diagnosis difficult. After many attempts, Professor Pan et al. found that the method of destroying red blood cells in blood chest and ascites with ammonium chloride which red blood cell lysis fluid was used to make the smear thin and clear, which was easy to observe.

The left is a traditional smear, the right is a smear treated with ammonium chloride, and the cancerous cells are much clearer. 

Red blood cells were destroyed by adding ammonium chloride erythrocyte lysate to blood chest and abdominal water to reduce the osmotic pressure of extracellular fluid and the effect was obvious. It not only destroyed red blood cells, but also kept other cells intac, no deformation, nuclear chromatin clear and the background is clear. This method can effectively destroy the red blood cells in pleural and abdominal water without affecting other cell morphology and subsequent films. In some extent, other cells are concentrated in the collection of epithelium, mesothelium and lymphocytes in pleural and abdominal effusion . Thus, the positive rate of cancer cells was increased and the method is reliable and worth popularizing.