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To determine the potential role of PTEN in the process of endometrial carcinogenesis, we examined a series of endometrial carcinoma and hyperplasia of the uterine corpus for the presence of a PTEN mutation. The entire coding region of the gene was screened for the presence of mutations by single-strand conformation polymorphism analysis, and mutations were confirmed by sequencing. We detected mutations in 14 of 57 endometrial carcinomas (13 of 50 endometrioid adenocarcinomas and 1 of 7 nonendometrioid adenocarcinomas) and 7 of 73 endometrial hyperplasias (1 of 24 simple hyperplasias without atypia, none of 16 complex hyperplasias without atypia, and 6 of 33 complex hyperplasias with atypia). Most (88%) mutations were clustered in exons 5, 7, and 8. Of the 24 mutations detected in 21 cases, 12 were frameshifts, 9 were nonsense, 2 were missense, and 1 was a silent mutation. Patients with a PTEN mutation had a better prognosis than those with no PTEN mutation. The presence of PTEN mutations in hyperplasia suggests that PTEN inactivation may occur as an initiating event in endometrial carcinogenesis and is involved in the development of cytologic atypia in hyperplasia.

To clarify the physiological role of hypothalamic neuronal histamine in control of food intake, ingestive behavior and neuronal activity were investigated under blockade or diurnal fluctuation of hypothalamic neuronal histamine. Histamine H1- but not H2-receptor antagonist potently induced feeding in a dose-related manner after infusion into rat third cerebroventricle at 1100 h. Elicitation was attenuated after infusion at 1940 h when histamine content in the hypothalamus was low and was abolished after intraperitoneal pretreatment with 0.11 mmol alpha-fluoromethylhistidine (alpha-FMH), a specific suicide inhibitor of histidine decarboxylase. Electrophoretic application of a histamine H1-receptor antagonist to ventromedial hypothalamic neurons specifically suppressed activities of glucose-responding neurons that are related to food intake. The suppressive effect was also attenuated by intraperitoneal pretreatment with alpha-FMH. These results suggest that feeding induced by histamine H1-receptor antagonists is due to blockade of neuronal histamine at the site of histamine H1-receptors, at least in part, in the ventromedial hypothalamus and that diurnal fluctuation of feeding behavior may reflect circadian variation of neuronal histamine level.