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Gastric mucosal blood flow as measured by the hydrogen gas clearance method was compared with total gastric blood flow as determined by venous outflow in an isolated segment of canine stomach. During rest and histamine stimulation, hydrogen gas clearance correlated lineally with total gastric blood flow (p less than 0.001). Correlation analysis revealed a slope of 1.21 and a correlation coefficient of 0.97. The slope of 1.21 indicates that the ratio of mucosal to total gastric blood flow was approximately 82 percent. This fractional distribution of blood flow is in agreement with that previously reported by microsphere technique. In the intact stomach of anesthetized rats and dogs, antral mucosal blood flow was significantly higher than that of the corpus. This finding may, in part, contribute to the observation that acute stress erosion occurs predominantly in the corpus of the stomach. Histamine stimulation selectively increased the mucosal blood flow of the corpus, whereas antral mucosal blood flow remained unchanged. As a result, there was no significant difference in mucosal blood flow between the antrum and the corpus during histamine stimulation.

Over the past few years there has been an apparent increase in interest in various methods of gastric analysis. The diagnostic and therapeutic implications of the results of the various types of gastric analyses have recently been re-examined by several authors [l-8]. The augmented histamine stimulation test has gained increasingly wide acceptance by clinicians. Growing experience with this method of gastric analysis has indicated it to be reliable and reproducible. This method of gastric analysis is currently the standard procedure at the Veterans Administration Hospital, Charleston, South Carolina. In the interest of simplifying the methodology of the augmented histamine stimulation test while retaining its reliability, a modification suggested by Stavney et al. [9] and others [JO,111 has been adopted. It consists primarily of intragastric titration of acid monitored by the Heidelberg pH telemetering capsule. Results obtained from the augmented histamine stimulation test utilizing the Heidelberg pH capsule have been compared to those results obtained by the standard nasogastric tube aspiration technic. The method and comparative results are presented herein.