Endocrine Abstracts

Hubert Vaudry, France-. AbstractDr Hubert Vaudry is Director of Research at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), the French National Institute for Health, and Director of the Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Neuroendocrinology at the University of Rouen. He was born in February 1946 in Le Havre, Normandy, and obtained his PhD at the University of Rouen in 1974. He then ...

Neuroactive steroids synthesized in the brain, referred to as neurosteroids, have gained particular attention as they appear to be involved in the modulation of various neuroendocrine, behavioral and pathophysiological processes. Thus, the distribution of steroidogenic enzymes and the identification of the biochemical pathways leading to neurosteroid formation have now been almost completely elucidated in various groups of vertebrates. In contrast however, the neuronal mechani...

The concentration of many neuropeptides in the brains of ectothermic vertebrates is several orders of magnitude higher than in the brains of mammals. We have taken advantage of this singular situation to isolate from the brain of the European green frog, Rana esculenta, a number of regulatory peptides that are orthologous to mammalian neuroendocrine peptides. These include α-MSH, γ-MSH, two tachykinins, two GnRH variants, CRH, PACAP, NPY, CGRP, CNP, GRP, and O...

It is now well demonstrated that, in the human adrenal gland, aldosterone and cortisol productions are stimulated by autocrine/paracrine factors, like serotonin (5-HT) and arginine vasopressin (AVP). Several data indicate that these signals may also be involved in the regulation of corticosteroidogenesis in adrenocortical hyperplasias and tumors. 5-HT is detected in clusters of steroidogenic cells in aldosterone-producing adrenocortical adenomas (APAs), and in both ACTH-indepe...