THE ROLE OF HORMONES IN ADIPOSE GLYCOGEN SYNTHESIS IN THE RAT. ANTERIOR PITUITARY GROWTH HORMONE

Anterior pituitary growth hormone exerts an influence on fat and carbohydrate metabolism in addition to its well known effect of promoting nitrogen storage and growth (Li and Evans, 1948). In the fasting animal, ketosis and an accumulation of fat in the liver occur rapidly after the injection of purified growth hormone (Bennett et al., 1948, Szego and White, 1949). The latter authors showed that the adrenal is not essential for this response. In the fasting normal, hypophysectomized or adrenalectomized rat crude anterior pituitary extract (Harrison and Long, 1940) and purified growth hormone (Milman and Russell, 1949) both produce a prolonged depression of the blood sugar. These latter observations suggest that some of the effects of growth hormone may be mediated in part by insulin. Such a viewpoint was first proposed by Mirsky in 1939 and further developed by Young (1939, 1941, 1944, 1945) and by Gaebler and Galbraith (1941) and Gaebler and Robinson (1942).