Gastric Aspiration versus Antimony and Glass pH Electrodes: A Simultaneous Comparative in Vivo Study

Abstract

To carry out a simultaneous comparison of the 24-h in vivo performance of antimony and glass electrodes and the findings of intermittent gastric aspiration, a triple-probe system with closely adjacent tips was positioned in the gastric corpus of 10 subjects representing different clinical and pharmacologic conditions. We showed that pH values measured with the antimony and the glass units were well correlated to those assessed in gastric aspirates (r_s = 0.87; b = 1.079; a = -0.33; and r_s = 0.85; b = 1.121; a = -0.38, respectively). A proportional correlation (r_s = 0.86; b = 0.97; a = 0.02) was also found between the two intraluminal pH measurements. With regard to the error frequency distributions obtained by comparing the three measuring systems two at a time, the pH pairs differed by no more than 1 pH unit in most cases (>90%). It can be concluded that antimony and glass pH electrodes can be used interchangeably in 24-h intragastric acidity studies in man.

Key Words:

• Antimony pH electrode
• gastric acidity measurement
• glass pH electrode
• nasogastric aspiration