American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol 33, 1396-1401, Copyright © 1980 by The American Society for Clinical Nutrition, Inc

ORIGINAL RESEARCH COMMUNICATIONS

Plasma and muscle free amino acids in children at the early stages of renal failure

M Broyer, G Jean, AM Dartois and C Kleinknecht

Plasma and muscle free amino acid analyses have been performed on four groups of children with different levels of renal failure. Mean plasma creatinine of the groups 1 to 4 was respectively 1.3, 2.3, 3.3, and 4.9 mg/100 ml. Significant but different alterations of plasma and muscle amino acid pattern were found in the four groups of patients. In plasma, aspartic acid, citrulline, OH-proline, 1- and 3-methyl histidine were regularly increased, while threonine, valine, phenylalanine, isoleucine, leucine, tryptophane, tyrosine, and tyrosine/phenylalanine ratio were generally decreased. In muscle, glutamine was usually increased and alanine, valine and valine/glycine ratio decreased; significant increase of total amino acid content was only noted in group 4. Some amino acid alterations became worse with renal failure such as 3-methylhistidine increase or tyrosine/phenylalanine decrease, but group 3 patients had the greatest number of individual amino acid alternations. This group of patients also had the highest protein intake. Relationship between growth velocity and muscle amino acid pattern was found, a poor growth rate was associated with an increase of nonessential and essential amino acids with the exception of valine.