BODY WATER COMPARTMENTS 

 THROUGHOUT THE LIFESPAN* 



H. Victor Parker, Knud H. Olesen, James McMurrey 

 and Bent Friis-Hansen 



Surgical Service and Laboratories of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, 



Harvard Medical School, Boston, and 



Queen Louise's Childreri's Hospital, Copenhagen 



Our first knowledge of the composition of the body was 

 acquired during the last decades of the nineteenth century. 

 The methods used were desiccation and chemical analysis 

 which allowed the determination of the contents of water and 

 electrolytes in carcasses or in single organs. With the recent 

 introduction of the dilution methods a new field of study has 

 grown up based on the in vivo measurements of the total 

 quantities of body water and its partitions. Direct dilution 

 methods are now available for the measurement of total body 

 water and of the extracellular water. The intracellular water 

 is calculated as the difference between total body water and 

 extracellular water and is thus a derived value (Moore et al., 

 1956). 



A few comments should be made about the methods and 

 the evaluation of the measurements. In the material presented 

 the total body water has been determined as the volume of 

 dilution of deuterium oxide. In the children the extracellular 

 water has been measured as the volume of dilution of thio- 

 sulphate and in the adult groups as the volume of distribution 

 of radioactive bromide corrected for red cell bromide, for the 

 relative water contents of plasma and interstitial water, and 

 for the Donnan effect. As the volume of dilution of thio- 



* This work was supported by a grant from the United States Atomic 

 Energy Commission to the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (AT-(30-l)-733), 

 and by the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, through a contract 

 (DA-49-007-472) with Harvard Medical School and sponsored by the Com- 

 mission on Liver Disease, Armed Forces Epidemiological Board. 



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