Total Body Water and Weight Changes in Normal Adults

Abstract

OBSERVATIONS on a series of patients with changing total body water and body weight stimulated our interest in the constancy of variation in these measurements in normal health. Bartley, Krebs and O'Brien¹ have looked for variations in body weight in normal subjects, but these were of no significance. Robinson and Watson² have weighed twenty-eight healthy young women at different times throughout the menstrual cycle and showed that there was a variation of less than ±1.0 kg in 98.2 per cent of all the subjects investigated. Total body water has been measured by several methods in the past, but the published information on changes in this as estimated by the tritium space on two different occasions is limited.