Life-history theory predicts that individuals should adapt their parental investment to the costs and benefits of the current reproductive effort. This could be achieved by modulating the hormonal stress response, which may shift energy investment away from reproduction and redirect it toward survival. In birds, this stress response consists of a release of corticosterone that may be accompanie...

The pituitary hormone prolactin is a pleiotropic endocrine factor that plays a major role in the regulation of ion balance in fish, with demonstrated actions mainly in the gills and kidney. The role of prolactin in intestinal ion transport remains little studied. In marine fish, which have high drinking rates, epithelial bicarbonate secretion in the intestine produces luminal carbonate aggregat...

The secretion of prolactin in cultured pituitary cells was studied in correlation with the cellular changes induced by stimulatory or inhibitory agents. The techniques used in this study were: radioimmunoassay, immunocytochemistry, scanning (SEM) as well as transmission (TEM) electron microscopy. Prolactin secretion was stimulated by 17 beta-estradiol (10 nM) as well as thyrotropin-releasing ho...

BACKGROUND Prolactin is an anterior pituitary hormone that may modulate the adverse effects of obesity. Prolactin has been associated with cardiovascular disease mortality, but less is known about whether prolactin predicts incidence of cardiovascular disease risk factors. METHODS AND RESULTS Our sample (n=3232, mean age 40.4 years, 52.1% women) was drawn from Framingham Heart Study participa...

The serum concentration of prolactin is frequently increased after single epileptic seizures and has therefore been used as a method to differentiate between hysterical attacks and epileptic seizures. We determined plasma prolactin concentrations in fifteen patients with status epilepticus. Seven patients had absence status, five complex partial and three generalised tonic-clonic status epilept...

Diabetes may affect the secretion of prolactin, the principal lactogenic hormone. Because adequate amounts are critical to the establishment of lactation, we assessed the prolactin status of 33 women with insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM), 33 women without diabetes, and 11 reference women participating in a study of lactation from 2 to 84 d postpartum. Circulating concentrations of ser...

methyldopa given for two to six weeks causes a rise in serum prolactin concentrations in hypertensive patients. Our studies have confirmed that patients on long-term treatment with methyldopa have raised serum prolactin concentrations. Furthermore, we have shown that even a single oral dose of methyldopa will increase serum prolactin concentrations. Basal serum prolactin levels varied considera...

MCF-7 human breast cancer cells, grown in long-term tissue culture, were found to be highly responsive to prolactin in terms of growth even in the presence of serum. Human prolactin, placenta!lactogen, and growth hormone (50-250 ng/ml) stimulated MCF-7 cells to grow when added to culture medium of cells in the presence of charcoal-stripped serum. Within 3 days of the hormone addition, a 4.4-fol...

Transcriptional regulation of the prolactin gene in the decidua differs from that in the pituitary. Several lines of evidence strongly suggest this difference is due to regulation of the prolactin gene in the decidua and other extra-pituitary tissues by tissue-specific transcription factors, which activate distinct promoters to induce prolactin gene expression in extra-pituitary sites compared ...