Increase in clusterin-containing follicles in the adenohypophysis of drug abusers

Abstract

The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) system in drug abusers may be affected due to disorders of the hypothalamic dopaminergic system. The present study investigated alterations in the adenohypophysis of middle-aged drug abusers (40-60 years of age), using clusterin-containing mixed cell-follicles as the indicator, in which clusterin (apolipoprotein J) is a multifunctional glycoprotein related to neurodegeneration. The paraffin-embedded adenohypophyses of methamphetamine and psychotropic drug abusers (n = 76) were compared with those of non-abusers (n = 82). The number of follicles was larger in drug abusers independent of the immediate cause of death, although the size was not significantly different. When cell types forming the follicles were immunohistochemically examined, drug abusers showed an increase of prolactin (PRL) cells and gonadotroph cells and a reciprocal decrease of growth hormone cells, suggesting hypofunction of dopaminergic neurons in the hypothalamus, while there was no change in the adrenocorticotropic hormone and thyroid-stimulating hormone cells. These increases of the clusterin-containing follicles and PRL cells in the follicles may be related to the dysfunction of dopaminergic neurons in the hypothalamus of chronic drug abusers and may be useful for investigating drug abuse in forensic casework.

Time-dependent appearance of intrathrombus neutrophils and macrophages in a stasis-induced deep vein thrombosis model and its application to thrombus age determination

“…The molecular and cellular pathophysiology of the wound healing process is applied for wound age determination. Recently, the immunohistochemical detection and RNA analyses of several molecules (e.g., extracellular matrix components, growth factors, cytokines, and adhesion molecules) has become a powerful method for forensic practices such as wound age determination or postmortem diagnosis [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45]. To the best of our knowledge, there have been only two forensic studies on thrombus age estimation Fig.…”

Hypothalamic and Pituitary Clusterin Modulates Neurohormonal Responses to Stress

“…In humans, clusterin expression of adenophysis increases in an age-dependent manner [21,23] and is also elevated in drug abusers [22]. Taken together, enhanced clusterin expression in the hypothalamus and pituitary glands is associated with various pathogenic conditions such as stress, ageing and drug abuse and may be engaged in the physiological defense by reducing cellular damage and inhibiting apoptosis [28,29].…”

“…Furthermore, clusterin expression has been observed in the adenophysis of humans, sheep and pig [21,22,23,24,25]. However, the effect of clusterin on neuroendocrine function has not been directly tested.…”

Postmortem biochemistry and immunohistochemistry of chromogranin A as a stress marker with special regard to fatal hypothermia and hyperthermia

“…After deparaffinization, the sections were immersed in 0.3% H 2 O 2 -methanol for 15 min to inactivate endogenous peroxidase. After a wash with PBS (3-5 min), blocking was performed with PBS containing 1% normal goat serum and 1% bovine serum albumin at room temperature for 30 min [25,26]. The primary antibody used was rabbit antihuman CgA antibody (1:500; DAKO, Glostrup, Denmark) [27].…”

“…For this purpose, the postmortem cutoff values for serum and CSF CgA levels were estimated to be 20 and 10 pmol/ml, respectively. The combined use of other biochemical and immunohistochemical markers may be more effective [17,18,25,26,28,[33][34][35].…”