Experience in determining sodium and potassium in whole blood, erythrocytes, blood plasma, saliva on a flame photometer of the PPF-UNIIZ type

The introduction of flame photometry into the practice of medical research has made it possible to extensively study the exchange of electrolytes in normal conditions and under various pathological conditions. To date, it has been sufficiently convincingly proven that the change in the content of Na and K in certain diseases in individual blood and its fractions - erythrocytes and plasma - does not occur in parallel (1, 2, 7, 10, 14). This, naturally, postulates the definition of them in each of these environments. The methods published in the domestic literature available to us have been developed on laboratory or foreign-made devices that are inaccessible to most medical institutions, and provide for the quantitative determination of electrolytes in one or two of the indicated research objects (3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 13). Determination of Na and K content using a domestic photometer of the PPF-UNIIZ type has been developed only for blood serum (6). In this regard, we offer our methodology. The principles of the method are now widely known, and we do not dwell on them.