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Most methods for measuring the total water content of the body in viva have been based on the degree of dilution of a foreign substance after its intravenous injection.These methods, recently reviewed by Pace (l), are in general unsatisfactory because the substances employed are not distributed evenly throughout the water of the body.Exceptions to this criticism are deuterium and tritium oxides (l-3), which presumably are distributed throughout the body like ordinary water.However, the costliness of these compounds and the complicated apparatus and techniques involved in their measurement make their use inconvenient.The proportion of water in the body may also be calculated from the subject's specific gravity (4), but this measurement is also laborious (5, 6) and there remains a need for a simple and accurate measure of body water.For measurements of body water a substance should possess the following characteristics: (1) even and rapid distribution throughout body water; (2) non-toxicity in required doses; (3) slow transformation in, and slow excretion from, the body; (4) accurate and convenient estimation of its concentration in the plasma.Prior studies in this laboratory on the distribution of antipyrine (lphenyl-2,3-dimethylpyrazolone-5-one) in the dog indicated that it was distributed in tissues in proportion to their water content.'The possibility that antipyrine might be used in the measurement of total body water in vivo was therefore explored, and the results indicate that antipyrine fulfills the above requirements to a reasonably satisfactory degree.Methods-Antipyrine in biological material was measured by a method previously reported (7).Deuterium oxide in plasma was measured by a modification of the method of Keston, Rittenberg, and Schoenheimer (8).
Soberman et al. (Sun,) studied this question.