Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 1987 in the subject Medicine - Urology, Nephrology, Case Western Reserve University (Department of Urology), language: English, abstract: In 1987, there was so far no data about surface tension in urine of different urologic disorders nor of physiologic human status. That is why nearly 500 out-patients were seen and their urine measured twice with a ring tensiometer by Fa.Kruss, Hamburg. Several proposals for methods to investigate the changes in the surface tension of biological or body fluids have been made already, since it has been suspected that such changes might reflect a pathophysiological status of the respective organism. Data on systematic measurements of the surface tension of various physiological fluids have been published, but not yet for urine during various urological diseases. Measurements of the surface tension of amniotic fluid were carried out clinically in conjunction with the respiratory distress syndrome. Other measurements of the surface tension were performed on bile, blood, cerebrospinal fluid, serum, lymph, saliva and tears. ABSOLOM et al. investigated in 1983, whether substrates with different surface tensions would induce a different degree of conformational change in adsorbed protein molecules, and whether these differences in the degree of change would be reflected by differences in the surface tension of the adsorbed layers. Their results were in good agreement with the relative hydrophobicity of the investigated proteins, as determined by other, independent methods. MYSELS carried out surface tension studies of bile salts dissolved in water with the purpose to show that, on the base of certain assumptions, the results of measurements of the surface tension of the solution may be translatable directly into the monomer activity and thus yield an indication for correlation. (...)