Relationships of Organ Weight to Body Weight

ORGAN WEIGHT and organ growth rate are parameters of primary importance in experimental biology, yet their interpretation is not always simple. Perhaps the most common complication is the need to establish the relationship of organ growth to that of the whole body. When the weight response of an organ to an experimental treatment is to be measured this complication becomes a part of the need to separate treatment response from adventitious variability, some of which may be associated with body weight. An efficient separation becomes of paramount importance when the treatments lead to organ-weight responses that differ but little, and attempts to remove the effects of body weight are usual in such experiments. They are sometimes also naive. Expressing organ weight as its ratio to body weight, and adjusting dose to body weight, are often used despite the nature of the particular organ-weight variability, of its relation to body …