Paper
TOTAL BODY WATER
Published Jan 1, 1957 ·
Acta Pædiatrica
23
Citations
3
Influential Citations
Abstract
The first determination of total body water ever carried out in the human subject was made by v.Bezold in 1857. He found by desiccation that a 5 month old human fetus contained 88 per cent water. It is very interesting to recall that he also demonstrated a gradually decreasing water content in mice during growth, from 87.5 per cent in the embryo, to 83 per cent at birth and 70 per cent in the old animal. Since then a great number of determinations of the chemical composition of the human fetus have been carried out. All the water determinations were made by desiccation. The results are summarized in table 3, which includes figures from the work of: v.Bezold (1857), Fehling (1877), Michel (1899), Schmitz (1924), Givens and Macy (1933) and Iob and Swanson (1934). All these observations gave very similar results. The average values gradually decrease from 93.8 per cent during the first month to 75.5 per cent at birth. This decrease is shown in fig. 12 (pag. 50).
The total body water content of a 5 month old human fetus gradually decreases from 93.8 percent during the first month to 75.5 percent at birth.
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