Renal blood flow
In the physiology of the kidney, renal blood flow (RBF) is the volume of blood delivered to the kidneys per unit time. In humans, the kidneys together receive roughly 25% of cardiac output, amounting to 1.1 L/min in a 70-kg adult male. RBF is closely related to renal plasma flow (RPF), which is the volume of blood plasma delivered to the kidneys per unit time.
While the terms generally apply to arterial blood delivered to the kidneys, both RBF and RPF can be used to quantify the volume of venous blood exiting the kidneys per unit time. In this context, the terms are commonly given subscripts to refer to arterial or venous blood or plasma flow, as in RBFa, RBFv, RPFa, and RPFv. Physiologically, however, the differences in these values are negligible so that arterial flow and venous flow are often assumed equal.
Renal plasma flow is the volume of plasma that reaches the kidneys per unit time. Renal plasma flow is given by the Fick principle:
This is essentially a conservation of mass equation which balances the renal inputs (the renal artery) and the renal outputs (the renal vein and ureter). Put simply, a non-metabolizable solute entering the kidney via the renal artery has two points of exit, the renal vein and the ureter. The mass entering through the artery per unit time must equal the mass exiting through the vein and ureter per unit time:
where Pa is the arterial plasma concentration of the substance, Pv is its venous plasma concentration, Ux is its urine concentration, and V is the urine flow rate. The product of flow and concentration gives mass per unit time.
As mentioned previously, the difference between arterial and venous blood flow is negligible, so RPFa is assumed to be equal to RPFv, thus
Rearranging yields the previous equation for RPF:
Values of Pv are difficult to obtain in patients. In practice, PAH clearance is used instead to calculate the effective renal plasma flow (eRPF). PAH (para-aminohippurate) is freely filtered, is not reabsorbed, and is secreted within the nephron. In other words, not all PAH crosses into the primary filtrate in Bowman's capsule and the remaining PAH in the vasa recta or peritubular capillaries is taken up and secreted by epithelial cells of the proximal convoluted tubule into the tubule lumen. In this way PAH, at low doses, is almost completely cleared from the blood during a single pass through the kidney. (Accordingly, the plasma concentration of PAH in renal venous blood is approximately zero.) Setting Pv to zero in the equation for RPF yields
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