Metabolic acidemia has been reported to increase nitrogen catabolism in chronic renal failure. However, in many of these studies the degree of acidemia produced was severe. We gave an acid load to 6 CAPD patients to determine whether mild to moderate acidemia in well dialyzed individuals also causes protein wasting. Patients were studied for 22 days on a constant diet under metabolic conditions in a Clinical Research Center (CRC). Diet, urine, fecal, and dialysate nitrogen were measured daily or in pools throughout the study by chemiluminescence. Patients were administered an equimolar quantity of NaHCO3 and NH4CI for 22 days starting 10 days prior to admission to the CRC. NaHCO3 was discontinued on day 13 and the patients' blood pH decreased from 7.40+0.01SEM to 7.29+1:0.01 (p<0.OO1) from the first to the last day of study. Serum HCO3 fell from 24.8+0.79 to 14.9+1.0 mE-q/L (p
Showing the most recent 10 out of 696 publications