STUDIES ON STRESS AND TESTICULAR FUNCTION

Abstract

Selye and Cooper reported that gynecomastia and testicular atrophy could occur soon after a stress was put on the organism. Excepting these reports, the phenomenons have never been described. We recently experienced some of these rare cases after they were given the stress such as operation, trauma or burn. Reporting these cases, we made an endocrinological investigation on them.
1) The measurement of 17-KS and gonadotropin excretion in urine revealed a decreasing tendency of 17-KS and an increasing one of gonadotropin. But this inclination was not observed equally in all the cases of ours, so we could not give a satisfactory explanation for these cases by only this finding.
2) We made a fractional measurement on urinary 17-KS by microscale elution column chromatography with a special attention to its fractions IV and V and obtained the following results:
a) The fraction IV was smaller than the fraction V in the patients with gynecomastia. This relation remained the same even after an operation; in other words, as regards androgenic hormones, a variation in the fractions IV and V is one of the most important factors in gynecomastia and testicular atrophy.
b) The above finding, i. e. the relation that the fraction IV is smaller than the V was also observed in the patients after coitus. Therefore, excessive coitus would possibly be a cause of stress.
3) The fractional measurement by column chromatography was carried out on estrogen before and after the operation and coitus, but no changes were seen in the ratio of its fractions.