Preston et al. [531] pointed out a major difficulty that occurs in the measurement of very small permeabilities using radiotracers. If the sample of labelled substance contains small quantities of labelled impurities that are more permeable than the principal substance, the impurities will make a disproportionately large contribution to permeability measured by accumulation of the radiolabel. They showed that further purification by thin layer chromatography decreased the measured permeability for mannitol and sucrose (see Table 7). Miah et al. [532] have taken this one step further and have compared the uptake of radiolabel from a sample of 14C-sucrose with the uptake of 13C-sucrose measured by mass spectrometry. Their measurements using a sample of radiolabelled sucrose yielded one of the higher measured permeabilities, while that obtained using assay of sucrose yielded the lowest. It is thus plausible that perivascular elimination accounts for an even larger fraction of the elimination of sucrose than indicated by comparison of the average of the rate constants in the table with the total rate constant of elimination.