The physiological disposition and metabolic fate of hydrocortisone in

The present report is concerned primarily with the physiological disposition and fate of hydrocortisone in man. Large doses of this steroid have been administered intravenously, and the rate of its disappearance from plasma has been determined in normal subjects and in patients with liver disease and various endocrinopathies. The following procedure is a modification of the recently published method of Silber and Porter (1): Principle-Hydrocortisone is extracted from plasma into dichloromethane. The dichloromethane extract is washed with aqueous alkali to remove a considerable amount of "blank" material. The dichloromethane is then shaken with a sulfuric acid-ethanol reagent, containing phenylhydrazine. The resulting colored product is measured in the acid phase spectrophotometrically at 410 mny. A correction for material in plasma reacting with sulfuric acid is made by treating an equal aliquot of dichloromethane extract of plasma with sulfuric acid-ethanol which contains no phenylhydrazine