Figure 3.

Illustration of how the effect of inhibition of an enzyme on bradykinin levels depends not only on the specific enzyme's contribution to bradykinin metabolism, relative to other enzymes, but also the baseline degradation rate for bradykinin. Pulmonary inactivation of bradykinin is approximately 99% (51). Thus, 1% inhibition of pulmonary inactivation will double the amount of bradykinin surviving pulmonary degradation, and may therefore double the level of bradykinin in arterial blood.