Changes of the total water content and magnetic relaxation characteristics of the liver and small intestine in vagotomy

Bilateral subdiaphragmatic truncal vagotomy in rats results in a disturbance of water metabolism in the liver and small intestine which manifests itself in an increase of the total water content, prolongation of the spin-lattice and spin-spin relaxation, and in a distortion of the correlation between them. The dynamics of water metabolism is of a onepeak nature in the liver with a maximum after 7 days, whereas in the small intestine it is of a dual-peak type with peaks at 7 and 30 days. Near-normalization of the water balance in the digestive organs occurs 220 days later. Translated fromByulleten' Eksperimental'noi Biologii i Meditsiny, Vol. 120, N ^o 10, pp. 442–444, October, 1995 Presented by P. V. Sergeev, Member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences