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Variability of serum prolactin and progesterone levels in normal women: The relevance of single hormone measurements in the clinical settings
Author(s) -
Fujimoto VY,
Clifton DK,
Cohen NL,
Soules MR
Publication year - 1991
Publication title -
international journal of gynecology and obstetrics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.895
H-Index - 97
eISSN - 1879-3479
pISSN - 0020-7292
DOI - 10.1016/0020-7292(91)90375-f
Subject(s) - prolactin , medicine , relevance (law) , citation , gynecology , clinical significance , hormone , library science , computer science , political science , law
In order to delineate factors contributing to variation in hormone levels,progesterone and prolactin (PRL) levels from 28 normal women, obtaineddaily during one menstrual cycle and every 20 minutes during a midluteal24-hour admission in a subgroup of five subjects, provided a data base foranalysis of these variables. Pulsatile analysis of the 24-hour data wasconducted using an adaptive-threshold algorithm, and normal referenceranges were generated from randomly selected daily hormone values. Ourdata verify that inherent variation can significantly alter single randomserum levels of reproductive hormones. These variations included menstrualcycle day, circadian influence, pulsatile secretion, assay error, andbiologic heterogeneity. Besides the expected day-to-day change inprogesterone levels during the luteal phase, seven of ten women exhibiteda significant circadian variation in progesterone; however, the time ofday of the peak level was not consistent among women. Prolactin levels didnot demonstrate any clinically relevant change over the menstrual cycle,but did have a consistent circadian pattern (nocturnal rise) over the24-hour study period. Pulsatile variation occurred in both progesteroneand PRL levels during the 24-hour admission. Five different referenceranges were generated from randomly selected single daily values from the28 normal menstrual cycles. Although the mean levels calculated for eachreference range were similar, the reference ranges demonstratedconsiderable variation due to the random sampling. In the fiveprogesterone reference ranges, the lower limit of the range varied from2.7-6.1 ng/mL, whereas the upper limit varied from 24.2-42.1ng/mL.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)