Blood Plasma Volume Determination by Injection of Anti-Crystalline-Egg-Albumin-Serum

Abstract

The blood plasma volume of an animal is usually found by determining the dilution in the plasma of a known amount of an injected test substance following its introduction into the blood stream. Dyes and other chemical substances are generally employed. The dilution of the material in the plasma is found (1) colorime-trically, 1 , 2 (2) spectroscopically, 3 or (3) by chemical means. 4 There is a considerable variation in the figures obtained for blood plasma volume by these methods. This variation may be due partly to loss of the injected foreign material from the blood stream and partly to the difficulty of determining the dilution of the substance introduced. The injection of an immunologically distinct blood or serum would, presumably, be more harmonious with the blood and tissues of an experimental animal than a foreign dye or other chemical substance. The dilution of such a blood could be determined by means of immunological tests. This has been resorted to by several investigators for the determination of blood volume. The first to present this method was von Behring. 5 His procedure consisted in finding the dilution of a known amount of an antitoxic serum after its introduction into the blood stream. Later, Todd and White 6 employed isohemolysins to determine the dilution of blood from another animal of the same species after its injection. Ashby 7 described a similar method which made use of isohemagglu-tinins for finding the blood volume of man.

These immunological methods have not been widely used, although they would seem potentially advantageous since a native animal protein is administered. This is in part perhaps because the immune reactions concerned seem to lack sufficient accuracy for determining the dilution of the injected blood.