Abstract
Acknowledgment is made for supervision of the biochemical work to Dr. Jack M. Curtis, National Research Council Fellow working in this Department as biochemist on endocrine problems.
A high content of oestrin has been reported in normal ovarian tissues 1 and in tumors of the ovary, 2 breast, 3 and uterus. 4 Estrogenic substances have been demonstrated in the blood and urine, and in some cases a fairly high yield has been reported from male urine.
High yields of anterior-pituitary-like hormone have been obtained from urine in cases of teratoma of the testis, 5 chorio-epithelioma and hydatidiform mole, 5 , 6 but Smith and Smith 7 have reported low levels of oestrin in such cases.
There have also been reports of atypical growth of prostatic tissues in rodents 8 , 9 , 10 and monkeys 11 , 12 following injections of estrogenic substances, and some of the female organs, rudimentary in the male, have been induced to hypertrophy by injections of oestrin. 13
The present study reports uniformly negative results from assays of hypertrophied prostatic tissues removed at operation from patients 60 to 80 years of age. Seven hypertrophied prostates, histologically hyperplastic but without evidence of malignancy, ranging from 9 to 28 gm., and also 23 samples of urine from 12 patients before and after prostatectomy, ranging in quantity from 1 to 1.5 liters, have given uniformly negative results in more than 100 tests. The methods used for extraction and assay of oestrin from tissue and from urine were those in current use for the detection of small amounts of this active substance.
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