To the Editor.—With reference to the paper published in the Journal, 113:683, 1967, by Drs. Warren F. Dodge, Luther B. Travis, and William Daeschner on "Comparison of Endogenous Creatinine Clearance With Inulin Clearance," it is interesting to witness once more what Wilfred Trotter called the "... mysterious viability of the false...."
The observation that endogenous creatinine clearance cannot be used, at least in infants and young children, as an accurate measure of the glomerular filtration rate has been repeatedly made in the literature for the last 15 years. However the erroneous assumption that it can be used for that purpose may be found in many papers and the excellent work of Drs. Dodge, Travis, and Daeschner is a useful reminder that it cannot. I was only surprised that they did not mention the paper (S. A. Doxiadis, and Margaret Goldfinch, J Physiol118:454, 1952) in which 15 years