Measuring muscle mass is an important component of the nutritional assessment examination and a suggested index of this body space is the 24-h urinary excretion of creatinine. The method originated from studies in a variety of animal species in whom early workers found a parallelism between total body creatine and urinary excretion of creatinine. Assuming that nearly all creatine was within muscle tissue, that muscle creatine content remained constant and that creatinine was excreted at a uniform rate, an obvious "corollary" was that urinary creatinine was proportional to muscle mass. The so-called "creatinine equivalence" (kg muscle mass/g urinary creatinine) ranged experimentally from 17 to 22. One of the limiting factors in firmly establishing
