Urinary Gonadotrophins in Post-Menopausal Women

Abstract

Urinary gonadotrophins from post-menopausal patients were tested by two methods of bioassay. Measured by the response of the mouse uterus, the daily excretion of total gonadotrophin in the less severely disabled patients ranged from 10 to 200 mg. equivalents of HMG 20 A. Patients with active rheumatoid arthritis showed similar levels but some patients with severe disability due to anorexia, reticulosis or anaemia excreted very little gonadotrophin.The gonadotrophins were also measured in terms of follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) using the ovarian response in mice treated with excess human chorionic gonadotrophin. It was found that they differed strikingly from HMG 20 A in being relatively more potent in the assay for FSH. This suggests that they contained relatively more FSH.The day-to-day fluctuation in the excretion of total gonadotrophin was compared with the differences between duplicate estimations. There were considerable quantitative fluctuations which could not be explained by the experimental errors. There was little evidence of major fluctuation in the quality of the gonadotrophins when this was assessed in a similar way.

Observations on the Assay of Human Urinary Follicle-Stimulating Hormone by the Augmentation Test in Mice

“…A similar method using mice (Brown, 1955) has been applied to the assay of FSH in human urine (Brown, 1963). The present paper describes experiments done with the aim of increasing the precision of the latter method, and of testing the efficiency of various techniques of preparing urinary extracts for assay.…”

Urinary Gonadotrophin Excretion During Treatment With Corticotrophin

“…* Tests of validity and the range of the fiducial limits in these assays were similar to those of a previous series (Brown, 1963) and are therefore not quoted.…”

“…collections of urine during the 2 days of treatment with ACTH and for 1 day before and 1 day after. They were measured both as total gonadotrophin and as follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) by methods used previously (Brown, 1963) and the results are expressed in terms of the inter¬ national reference preparation for human menopausal gonadotrophin (IRP).…”