Rapid simultaneous determination of regional blood flow and blood‐brain glucose transfer in brain of rat

A new method was developed and used in rat to measure regional and whole‐brain blood flow and blood‐brain glucose transfer simultaneously and in 20 s. This simple method consisted of i. v. bolus injection of labeled butanol and tracer glucose, determination of the average arterial tracer concentration and subsequent assay of cerebral tissue activity 20 s after bolus injection. The whole‐brain blood flow rate averaged 129 ml (100 g)^‐1 min^‐1. The unidirectional blood‐brain glucose transfer was twice as high as previously estimated in similar studies on rat, or 144 μmol (100 g)^‐1 min^‐1 at 10 mM glucose in plasma. The magnitude is sufficient to explain the high cerebral glucose consumption rates recently determined by means of the autoradiographic 2‐deoxy‐D‐glucose method of Sokol off et al. (1977).