Body Weight, Ovarian Enlargement and Urinary Steroids

Abstract

The urinary excretion of 17-ketosteroids. Porter• Silber chromogens and ll-desoxycortisol metabolites expressed per day. per square meter of body surface or per gram of urine creatinine was increased to the same degree in females with ovarian enlargement whether or not obesity was present. With only one exception, dexamethasone produced co rnparable suppression and exogenous ACfH evoked similar increases in these urinary steroids in non-obese and obese patients with enlargement of the ovaries. In the last 4 days of dexamethasone suppression (8 mg/day), urinary 17-ketosteroids were slightly higher in the obese group. The urinary creatinine, 17-ketosteroids and Porter• Silber chromogen excretion of non-obese women (body weight: 139 ± 191bs) with ovarian enlargement, expressed in mg/day, exceeded that of the non-obese controls. Such differenoes were not evident when an obese group (body weight: 198 ± 24 Ibs) with ovarian enlargement was cornpared to obese controls. The latter finding suggests that. even though obesity alone and ovarian enlargement alone tend to be associated with similar changes in urinary creatinine and in oertain classes of urinary steroids, these characteristics of the two conditions are not additive.