Abstract
The increasing clinical use of estrogens in the treatment of stress-incontinent women caused us to examine receptor patterns in the female bladder and urethral tissue, and to characterize possible receptors by means of Scatchard plot analysis, competition experiments and density gradient centrifugation.
Tissue samples of the lower urogenital tract (bladder, urethra and pubococcygeal muscles) from 16 pre- and postmenopausal women were examined for the presence of estradiol, progesterone and androgen receptors. The radioactivity labeled ligand for the estradiol receptor was 125I-estradiol, for the progesterone receptor the highly specific binding synthetic progestin 3H-R5020, and for the androgen receptor 3H-DHT or the synthetic tritium-labeled R1881. The binding capacity and the dissociation constant were determined by a multipoint saturation charcoal dextran absorption assay and Scatchard plot analysis of the binding data. Four of the 16 bladders examined were estradiol receptor-positive and in two tissue samples progesterone receptors could be detected. Androgen receptors were present in all tissue samples analyzed using DHT as a tritium-labeled ligand. As the amount of tissue was limited, the androgen receptor could not be characterized in all tissue samples using R1881 as a specifically binding ligand. However, six of the 13 tissue samples examined using R1881 were receptor-positive.
The hierarchy of the relative binding affinity (RBA) patterns corresponded to that of the human uterus, a typical target organ for sexual steroids, or to that of the rat prostate, a tissue with a high content of androgen receptors. Splitting the 3H-estradiol, 3H-R5020 and/or 3H-DHT receptor complexes via a 10%–30% sucrose density gradient in a low-salt buffer resulted in steroid receptor complexes sedimenting in the 4S and 8S regions, which is considered to be a specific characteristic of steroid hormone receptors.
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Strittmatter, H.J., Wischnik, A., Pollow, K. et al. Steroid hormone receptors in the female urogenital tract. Int Urogynecol J 5, 146–153 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00386627
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00386627