Gonad-Stimulating Hormone in Urine of a Patient with a Chorioepithelioma Uteri. ∗

Conclusion

The gonad-stimulating hormone found in the urine of a patient with a chorioepithelioma uteri had certain biologic characteristics similar to those of the substance occurring in women during normal gestation.

Although the discovery of Rössler, 1 that the urine of women with hydatidiform mole or chorioepithelioma uteri contains large amounts of a gonad-stimulating factor, has been repeatedly confirmed, there is as yet no information available as to the nature of this hormone.

The specimens examined in this study were from a patient under the care of Doctors Reginald Knight Smith and T. Henshaw Kelly. She was a woman of 29, who developed a chorioepithelioma uteri following a hydatidiform mole, and died with extensive metastases in the liver and in the lungs.

A number of extracts were prepared by alcohol precipitation of the urine, and various dosages were injected into more than 25 immature rats. The histologic examination of the ovaries of these animals showed the presence of a few corpora lutea, lutein cysts, and developing graafian follicles. The injection of a known dosage of the extract to a group of 5 rats over a period of 5 days produced an average increase in ovarian weight of 63%, while the administration of the same total dosage over a period of 10 days to 5 litter-mates gave an average increase of 90%. It has been shown previously that these 2 findings are characteristic of the gonad-stimulating hormone found in pregnant women and not of anterior pituitary extracts (Fluhmann 2 , 3 ).

Administration of the untreated urine failed to induce any demonstrable changes in the atrophied ovaries of 2 hypophysectomized rats, but a concentrated extract induced an extensive development of the theca and interstitial tissue in 4 other instances. It has been shown by Noguchi, 4 Collip et al., 5 and Smith and Leonard 6 that this is a characteristic of the gonad-stimulating hormone of pregnant women.