Effect of Testosterone on the Mammary Gland

Abstract

The fact that derivatives of the male hormone may exert an action on the female sex organs is known from the work of Butenandt and Hanisch, 1 who showed that androstenedione which is inactive in castrate females produces vaginal oestrus in the presence of an ovary, and from the work of Parkes, 2 who found that the same is true in the case of androstanediol. The action of these compounds might possibly be explained by a transformation of these substances into oestrin by the ovary. This would seem all the more likely since Collip, Browne and Thomson 3 , 4 , 5 have shown that the ether-insoluble fraction of oestrin extracted from pregnancy urine (Emmenin) is relatively inactive in the spayed female, while it is much more active in the presence of an ovary. Several compounds of the androsterone-testosterone series, however, do also cause vaginal cornification in ovariectomized female rats, as shown recently by Deanesly and Parkes 6 and Korenchevsky and coworkers, 7 and it is still to be seen whether this is due to a transformation of these compounds in the female organism into female hormones by tissues other than the ovary, or whether male hormone may stimulate the genital organs of the female directly. It seems of interest in this connection that we were able recently to obtain milk secretion, that is the development of a female characteristic even in the male, both normal and castrate, by the administration of testosterone, the most active compound of the male hormone series, first isolated by Laqueur, et al. from testes, The same hormone also causes milk secretion in normal and ovariectomized females. In all our experiments we used crystalline synthetic testosterone-benzoate.∗