A combined system for the study of glutathione metabolism in erythrocytes.

A combined system for measuring glutathione stability, hexose monophosphate pathway activity, glutathione synthesis, glucose consumption and lactate formation in erythrocytes has been devised. By this method the results were obtained from the blood samples of six glucose 6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiencies, one glucose phosphate isomerase deficiency and two pyruvate kinase deficiencies. These results indicate that one abnormal enzyme may exert its influence on the other several enzyme systems and that it is valuable to investigate the metabolism of erythrocytes using this system in different erythroenzymopathies as well as different variants of one enzyme deficiency.