Urinary Excretion of Gonadotrophins with Particular Reference to Children.

Until recently there has been fairly general agreement that gonadotrophins are not detectable in the urine during childhood. Table I summarizes the results of previous investigators in this field. Of the early workers, only Catchpole and Greulich (1943) have, in serial determinations, detected gonadotrophins in young girls. More recently, studies performed on pools of urine have indicated that gonadotrophins are excreted as early as 3 to 5 years in boys (Knappe, Dorner, and Stahl, 1961), and possibly in girls (Carletti and Kehyayan, 1962a, b), though the latter workers used combined pools for boys and girls. Full experimental details have not been published to substantiate the claim of Minkina (1961) that gonadotrophin excretion in girls aged 1-3 years is very much higher than in girls at or near the menarche. In 1960, Landau, Schwartz, and Soffer suggested that children's urine contained an inhibitor for gonadotrophins. They observed inhibition of the response when extracts of children's urine were combined with extracts of known gonadotrophic potency. A later report (Soffer, Futterweit, and Salvaneschi, 1961) substantiated these observations, particularly with regard to children under 6 years of age. Soffer, Salvaneschi, and Futterweit (1962) claimed to have detected a factor in all age-groups that inhibited the action of human chorionic gonadotrophin (HCG), but failed to inhibit the uterine response to oestrone. In view of the paucity both of positive results in young children and of results in terms of standard reference preparations, it seemed of value to investigate again the excretion of gonadotrophins in childhood. This was an essential preliminary to assessing gonadotrophin excretion in pathological conditions. The increase in uterine weight of the immature mouse is regarded as the most sensitive end-point for the routine bio-assay of total urinary gonadotrophins (Rosemberg, 1961). Though methods commonly