Urinary D‐glucaric acid and oral contraceptives.

Abstract

, 1973), and a number of known enzyme inducers cause large increases in urinary D-glucaric acid excretion (Latham et al., 1973). While establishing an assay method for Dglucaric acid we have investigated the excretion of Dglucaric acid by users, and non-users of oral contraceptives.Twenty None of these means were significantly different when compared by Student's t-test. Although some of the women taking oral contraceptives excreted more D-glucaric acid on day 20 than day 3 (Figure 1), the increases were much less than the five to ten fold increases in D-glucaric acid excretion caused by some drugs (Maxwell et al., 1972). In contrast to these results an earlier study (Mowat, 1968) provided evidence of an increased D-glucaric acid excretion by nine women taking oral contraceptives (four Ovulen, two Orthonovin, two Gynovlar, one Conovid E), when compared to non-users. A possible explanation for these differing results may be the higher doses of progestagen and oestrogen in most of the tablets used in Mowat's (1968) investigation. These generally contained 100 gg oestrogen with 2 or 3 mg progestagen, whereas the oral contraceptives used in the present study generally contained 30 or 50 g oestrogen with d-norgestrel (0.15 mg) or norethisterone (0.5 or 1 mg) as the progestagen.The results obtained in the present study appear to be compatible with observations of the lack of effect of oral contraceptives on the disposition of other drugs. Br.