Failure of various agents to decrease oleic acid pulmonary albumin leak.

Computerized pulmonary gamma scintigraphy has been shown to be a sensitive technique for the measurement of albumin flux in oleic acid pulmonary microvascular injury. In this technique technetium-99m-tagged human serum albumin is administered intravenously and lung:heart radioactivity ratios are constructed. This ratio remains constant unless there is a net flux of albumin from the vascular space into the lung, when a rising ratio is seen, called the "slope of injury" or SI. Gamma scintigraphy provides a method to rapidly screen the ability of various possible therapeutic agents to reduce the flux of albumin in experimental ARDS. In this study, 0.05 ml/kg oleic acid produced a significant increase in the SI. None of the agents tested (30 mg/kg methylprednisolone, 12.5 mg/kg ibuprofen, 4 mg/kg MK-447, a superoxide radical scavenger, or 140 mg/kg calcium gluconate) were able to alter the scintigraphically measured increased albumin flux produced by 0.05 ml/kg oleic acid.