Water in malignant tissue, measured by cell refractometry and nuclear magnetic resonance

It has been known that tumour-bearing tissues often have a significantly higher water content than the normal tissues from which they have been derived. Most of the evidence suggesting this in recent years has been obtained from methods employing nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), which, although undoubtedly indicative of hydration, cannot at present be precisely quantified. Furthermore it has not been possible by these means to determine whether this overall increase in the water content of the tissue is principally an increase in the extracellular fluid or whether the water content of the tumor cells and the cells immediately adjacent to the tumours increases also. In this investigation, which is the first of its kind, a combination of NMR and immersion refractometry techniques have been used to examine the water content of normal and tumour bearing tissues. NMR measurements were made on pieces of normal and tumour bearing tissue from rat livers: intact living cells were also isolated from these pieces and their refractive indices measured by immersion refractometry from which the water content of their cytoplasm was calculated. It was found that all the cells so measured obtained from hepatomas had more water in their cytoplasm (usually over 5% more water) than any of the cells from normal livers; and that normal-looking liver cells taken from the vicinity of hepatomas also all had more water in them than those of normal liver cells, although the differences in this case were less. These results were closely parallel to those obtained by NMR measurements. It is therefore concluded that an appreciable proportion of the increase in the water content of the tissue as a whole that occurs during carcinogenesis, must, in this tissue, be an increase in intracellular water.