Description

Test Criteria

Plasma renin activity (PRA) is a measure of the rate of generation of angiotensin I by a plasma sample under controlled conditions. It is thus a crude measure of the endogenous velocity of the enzyme-substrate reaction. Plasma renin activity has been found to be consistently higher in fetal lambs than in the ewe in the chronically cannulated state (Broughton Pipkin et al., 1974a; Smith et al., 1974; Fleischman et al., 1975; Broughton Pipkin and O’Brien, 1978). Plasma renin activity has also been measured in the “cord blood” of three abortuses delivered by hysterotomy at 16-20 weeks of gestation (Franks and Hayashi, 1979). In two of the three, plasma renin activity was higher than in simultaneously obtained maternal blood.