Quantitative determination of the urinary cortisol metabolites, tetrahydro F, allo-tetrahydro F and tetrahydro E: effects of adrenocorticotropin and complex trauma in the human.

Methods for the quantitative estimation of plasma cortisol concentration have been devised by Nelson and Samuels (1), Silber and Porter (2), and Peterson and Wyngaarden (3) who used the sulfuric acid-induced fluorescence developed by Sweat (4). Together with urinary procedures (5, 6) these techniques have been employed to determine the secretion of cortisol by the adrenal in normal and pathological conditions (7-9) and to evaluate the factors involved in the "removal" of cortisol from the plasma in surgery (10-13) and liver disease (14-16). Although a considerable amount of work has been done in isolating and identifying such urinary metabolites of cortisol as THF8 and THE (1722) and their interconversions (23-25), much less has been done to relate the quantitative transformations of these urinary metabolites from cortisol under normal and pathological conditions. In 1953, deCourcy, Bush, Gray, and Lunnon (26) reported daily excretion values for two chromatographically separated urinary steroids corresponding in migration rates to THF and THE, in 10