SAN FRANCISCO -- In startling revelations about one of the world's most hated dictators, a researcher concluded Adolf Hitler suffered from a malady in which his own defense system mistakenly attacked him from within.
After seven years of intensive study of mounds of medical data, psychiatrist Fritz Redlich -- a Jew forced to flee his native Austria in 1938 to escape extermination -- diagnosed 'giant cell arteritis.'
In the autoimmune condition, like lupus, the body's disease-fighting immune system erroneously wages war against itself. In this case, the charge is aimed primarily at medium-sized arteries in the head and neck.
In his report to be published Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine, Redlich said the disease -- the causes of which remain a mystery -- would explain most of Hitler's physical ailments but not his crimes.
Redlich will present his psychiatric conclusions on what drove the mastermind with dreams of world domination and of the murder of millions of non-Aryans during World War II in an upcoming book. The only contributing factor mentioned in the study is amphetamine abuse.
Redlich called his findings significant because the disease was overlooked by specialists in countless earlier studies.
'Even without a biopsy or an autopsy, a diagnosis of giant cell arteritis is more likely than any other made in the past,' Redlich said in an interview. 'It is surprising this diagnosis has not even been considered until now.'
Previous studies suggested Hitler suffered from coronary sclerosis, hypertension, irritable bowel disease, gallstones, hepatitis B and Stellar hyalitis -- a cloudiness of the vitreous body of the eye.
None of these, Redlich said, adequately explain the symptoms Hitler suffered, primarily during the last four years of his life: severe headaches, intestinal spasms, vision and weight loss, liver and heart problems, fever, anemia and oversensitivity to sunlight.
Giant cell arteritis, also called temporal arteritis, can account for these signs, said Redlich, 83, professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Yale University.
The chronic disease inflames and reduces blood flow most often in temple arteries, causing severe headaches and visual impairment or even blindness. It also can batter other blood vessels, harming the heart, liver and intestines.
The disorder strikes older patients: Hitler fell ill in 1941 at age 50.
The disease is a self-limited one, stopping on its own at a certain point, hopefully before it has caused irreversible damage or killed the patient with a heart attack or stroke, Redlich said.
'I think this was the case with Hitler, who suffered no more symptoms after Dec. 31, 1944,' he said.
Although giant cell arteritis was first described in 1937, Hitler's physician Dr. Theodor Morell -- a fashionable Berlin practitioner with a great bedside manner but a poor knowledge of medicine -- probably had never heard of it.
Even if he had made the proper diagnosis, he could not have helped the German dictator because the drug of choice for treating the disorder -- cortisone -- was not discovered until after Hitler's suicide, Redlich said.
The disorder may have contributed to Hitler's Parkinson's disease, although such a connection is extremely tentative at best, he said.
The tyrant -- who at 50 had only 14 natural teeth and was forced to eat soft foods -- was diagnosed with the progressive, debilitating brain disorder, which afflicts 1 million mostly elderly Americans, before his death from potassium cyanide and a gunshot wound.
At that time, there was no effective treatment for Parkinson's either.
The gradual, chronic loss of muscle control results in stooped posture, rigid movements, a shuffling gait, involuntary tremors and loss of facial expression -- symptoms clearly visible in newsreels of the charismatic Nazi leader.
Redlich's study was based primarily on the medical records of Morell, Hitler's personal doctor from August 1941 until the dictator's death April 30, 1945, 10 days after his 56th birthday. Redlich also examined extensive notes of Morell's numerous consultants and interviewed people who knew Hitler.
'It was sheer luck some of Morell's therapies did not kill the patient,' he said, citing, for example, the doctor's potentially lethal combination of morphine derivatives to induce constipation with high doses of laxatives.
Morell treated Hitler -- a vegetarian who neither drank nor smoked -- with 90 drugs, including vitamins, tonics, opiates, cocaine, barbiturates and ineffective hormones, with leeches and with hundreds of intravenous glucose injections.
Redlich, long fascinated with unraveling the secrets of Hitler's medical and mental health, embarked on his quest with the conviction, 'Hitler was just neurotic.'
'Then I realized he was also quite ill during the later part of his life,' he said. 'Morell himself vascillated between two images: Hitler the neurotic and Hitler the seriously sick. He didn't know you could be both.'
