Corticosterone secretion

The amygdala is perhaps the best-studied, and most strongly implicated, brain structure in anxiety and fear. Electrical stimulation of the amygdala produces fear-like behavioral and physiological responses in animals, and increases the suggestive experience of fear in human subjects. Additionally, amygdala stimulation leads to corticosterone secretion and HPA-axis activation in animals, probably via outputs to the hypothalamus and the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. It has been suggested... 

Deroche, V, Piazza, P.V, Le Moal, M., and Simon, H. (1994) Social isolation-induced enhancement of the psychomotor effects of morphine depends on corticosterone secretion. Brain Res 640 136-139. 

Kitchen I, Kelley M, Turner M (1988) Dopamine receptor modulation of corticosterone secretion in neonatal and adult rats. J Pharm Pharmacol 40 580-581. 

Casolini P, Catalaui A, Zuena AR, Angelucci L (2002) Inhibition of COX-2 reduces tire age-dependent increase of hippocampal inflammatory mai kers, corticosterone secretion, and behavioral impairments in tire rat. J Neurosci Res 68 337—343. 

Hiai S, Yokoyama H, Oura H. Features of ginseng saponin-induced corticosterone secretion. Endocrinol Jpn 1979 26 737-740. 

Gu, Y. and Lin, Y. C. (1991). Suppression of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH)-induced corticosterone secretion in cultured rat adrenocortical cells by gossypol and gossypolone. Res. Commun. Chem. Pathol. Pharmacol. 72, 27-38. 

Fig. 4. Adrenotoxicity of atrazine (a herbicide) and endosulfan (an insecticide) extensively used in agriculture in North America, in adrenal cells of Xenopus laevis and the bullfrog, Rana catesbeiana (modified from Goulet and Hontela37). Corticosterone secretion is indicated by solid line, cell viability by broken line. While endosulfan has a similar toxicity in both species, atrazine is a highly potent endocrine toxicant with no cytotoxicity (EC50

Ritter S, Watts AG, Dinh TT, Sanchez-Watts G, Pedrow C. 2003. Immunotoxin lesion of hypothalamically projecting norepinephrine and epinephrine neurons differentially affects circadian and stressor-stimulated corticosterone secretion. Endocrinology 144 1357-1367. 

Both exogenous and endogenous CBi receptor agonists stimulate adrenocorti-cotrophic hormone (ACTH) and corticosterone secretion (Dewey 1986 Weiden-field et al. 1994 Wenger et al. 1997 Manzanares et al. 1999). 

One of the salient features of stress is an increased secretion of cortisol or corticosterone from very shortly after the moment of injury and lasting for 3 days or more, although plasma levels rise to a peak of about three times basal and return to normal within a few hours (J2). We have found that, in the rat, increased corticosterone secretion, as measured by plasma levels 1 hour after injury, due to long bone fracture is not affected by housing the animals at 30°C before and after injury (T4). 

L17. Loras, B., Cautenet, B., Do, F., Forest, M., de Peretti, E., Saez, J. M., and Bertrand, J., Corticosterone secretion rate in infants and children before and during salt depletion. Excerpta Med. Intern. Congr. Ser. Ill, 175 (1966). 

Example compounds affecting the adrenal cortex include acrylonitrile, amino-gluthemide, amytriptyline, aniline, carbon tetrachloride (Colby et al. 1994), chloroform, cimetidine, etomidate, domperidone, fluphenazine, glycyrrhizin, ketoconazole (Loose et al. 1983), methanol, parathion, pentabarbitone, phencyclidine, pyra-zole, spironolactone, tamoxifen, and urethane (Colby and Longhurst 1992 Szabo and Sandoz 1997). Amytriptyline and cimetidine reduce corticosterone secretion, whereas pentobarbitone and phencyclidine increase its secretion. Etomidate inhibits 11(3- and 17a-hydroxylating reactions. Spironolactone affects cytochrome P450 enzymes (Kossor et al. 1991), and domperidone blocks cortisol secretion. Some ACAT inhibitors cause adrenal cytotoxicity (Wolfgang et al. 1995). 

Hiai, S., H. Yokozawa, and H. Oura Features of Ginseng Saponin-induced Corticosterone Secretion. Endocrinol. Japan. 26, 737 (1979). 

That the nature of the adrenal secretion may be considerably altered in a single species by ACTH administration has been observed in the rabbit by Kass et al. (1954). These workers observed that prolonged administration of the tropic hormone increased the amount of cortisol and decreased the amount of corticosterone secreted. This observation was essentially confirmed by Krum and Glenn (1965), and the mechanism was further studied by Fevold (1967, 1969). 

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