Acid Phosphatase Activity in Ureteral Urine

Abstract

THE DETECTION of unilateral renal disease has become an important goal in modern medicine, primarily because many cases of hypertension are founded on this basis, and, therefore, are potentially curable by surgery. The search for such cases has depended, in part, on the comparison of the amount of various substances in ureteral urine from the suspect and opposite sides. The chemical substances that are commonly determined—water, sodium, chloride, potassium, creatinine, protein, inulin, para-aminohippurate—are substances which, for the most part, are extracted from the blood by the kidneys and are excreted into the urine and, therefore, reflect the functional integrity of the kidneys. The kidneys, however, are known to have a substantial functional reserve, so that it is likely that anatomic integrity would deteriorate long before the functional counterpart would. One line of approach to the study of renal anatomical integrity is the determination of ureteral urine enzyme activity, for most