On the hypertrophy of the interstitial cells in the testicle of the guinea-pig under different experimental conditions

Abstract

Quantitative problems are, no doubt, of the greatest theoretical and practical interest in the study of the internal secretion of the sexual glands. We are explaining different physiological and clinical situations by changes in the quantity of internal secretion of the sexual glands or of other glands of internal secretion connected with the former. It suffices to mention normal puberty, menstruation and gravidity, eunuchoïdism and pubertas præcox. Quantitative problems were already discussed when the first steps were made in the study of the question of the site of the internally secretory function of the sexual glands (l). Bouin and Ancel(2) tried to cause by different experimental means a compensatory hypertrophy of the interstitial cells of the testicle; they extirpated the testicle in rabbits on one side and ligatured the vas deferens on the other side; they found a proliferation of the interstitial cells, whereas the number of the cells of Sertoli remained unchanged. Further, they extirpated the normal testicle of pigs with unilaterally retained testicle (3). They found in these experiments that the weight of the retained testicle was about twice as much as when the normal testicle was present. They found also in these cases a marked hypertrophy of the interstitial cells. Sand (4) confirmed these statements in his experiments on rabbits and guinea-pigs using his method of experimental cryptorchism. From all these experiments one could conclude that the hypertrophy of the interstitial cells takes place as a compensatory hypertrophy of the elements acting as an organ of internal secretion. But there are some objections one can make against this conception. Ribbert (5) has shown that after unilateral castration the remaining testicle is greater than normally, and that there is a marked hypertrophy of the seminiferous part of the testicle. From experiments performed in our laboratory, we can state (6) that the hypertrophy of the remaining testicle is so marked that it weighs twice or thrice as much as a normal testicle of an animal of the same age. Sand showed that the remaining testicle can undergo the same hypertrophy even when the vas deferens is ligatured; this is due to the fact that, even after the vas deferens is ligatured, the spermatogenesis can proceed in a normal way, and the degeneration of the tubules begins only when the spermatogenesis is more or less completed. So one may object that, when the testicular mass is diminished, there is hypertrophy not only of the interstitial cells but also of the seminiferous part. This is why I said, two years ago (7), that the situation seemed to be more complicated than Bouin and Ancel supposed, basing their conclusions on ingenious experiments, performed about twenty years previously, when nobody could foresee the extraordinary development which the study of the internal secretion of the sexual glands has undergone in recent years.