Urea determination in dialysis, based on a differential pH technique.

The application of a new technique, based on differential measurements of pH, to determine urea concentration in patients of a dialysis center, is reported. Urea in plasma, whole blood or dialysis fluids is measured by an enzymatic reaction, with urease; the procedure, requiring 10 microL of sample, is simple, fast and correlates well with a reference spectrophotometric method, in the 0-300 mg/dL concentration range, according to the equation y = 1.0291 X -0.0777; r = 0.9991; n = 73.

Evaluation of the efficiency of a new hollow fiber plasmapheresis filter.

Plasma separation for plasma exchange or plasma treatment has, until now, been obtained prevalently by centrifugal separators. Recently, filters capable of continuously separating the plasma have been proposed. We have evaluated, both in vivo and ex vivo, the efficiency of a plasma separating filter (BT 900, Dideco, Mirandola, Italy) incorporating polypropylene hollow fibers with a pore size of 0.55 micron (PS 510 W, Membrana, Wuppertal, Germany) and an effective surface of 0.23 m2, using two hemodialysis blood pumps. Ex vivo, (bovine blood) at a blood flow (QB) of 100 ml/min, 47 +/- 2.8 ml/min of plasma were obtained in the first hour and 34 +/- 3.1 ml/min in the second hour. The Sieving coefficient was 100 for albumin and IgG, 98.4 for IgA and 92.3 for IgM. Neither hemolysis nor platelet contamination were observed. In vivo, 35 treatment were performer on 19 patients affected with mixed essential cryoglobulinemia, autoimmune glomerulonephritis, Wegener disease, thrombotic thrombocytopenic microangiopathy and rheumatoid arthritis. There were no clinical complications and the treatment was always well tolerated. A mean of 2064 +/- 400 ml of plasma was obtained in 103.7 +/- 29 minutes. The plasma flow was correlated (p less than 0.001) with the blood flow (13.4 ml/min at QB = 30 ml/min; 29 ml/min at QB = 100 ml/min). In some cases, immune complexes were found in the plasma removed by the filter (conglutinin method), confirming the membrane permeability to these high weight molecules. The use of hollow fibers to separate formed elements of blood from plasma has a brief history (1, 5).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Long-term use of a "stable" bicarbonate containing dialysate.

We present an original method for the preparation of "stable" dialysate containing 35 mEq/l of bicarbonate. The dialysate was utilized with 4 patients for periods ranging from 4 months to 1 year according to a short-term recirculated dialysis schedule in closed circuit (20-40L) (2-2 1/2 hrs) on alternate days. Preliminary results are reported here with respect to the tollerance of the dialytic run and correction of the acid-base balance equilibrium. The clinical tollerance is excellent despite high dehydration rates even in patients particularly sensitive to ultrafiltration. The acidosis correction would seem to be much better with bicarbonate than with traditional dialysis. The difference is even higher if we consider the brevity of the dialysis. During the bicarbonate dialysis we do not observe any fall of the PCO2 or significant difference in PO2 in the patient's blood. The correction of acidosis probably causes the normalization of pre-dialytic potassiemia in spite the "net" removal of K with short dialysis is considerably less.

Role of oxygen on growth rate and gene activity in cultured chick-embryo heart cells.

Environmental oxygen is shown to have a regulatory role in growth rate and the mechanism of gene de-repression in chick-embryo heart cells; it modulates the intracellular concentration of polyamines, and this appears to be closely related to histone acetylation.