The Effects of Leuprolide Acetate to the Testicular Histopathology of Male Rat

Park, Tae Sik; Kim, Dong Han

Abstract

We performed this study to observe the effects of chronic administration of leuprolide acetate(potent synthetic LHRH analog) to the testicular histopathology of prostatic cancer patient and to the spermatogenesis in cryptochism treatment. Ten out of fifty healthy male rats whose body weight ranged 250-300gm were selected as a control group and the other forty as a study group. Two hundred micro-gram of leuprolide acetate was injected daily into the peritoneal cavity of study group, and ten rats were sacrificed at each first, second, third and sixth week, respectively. Then the changes of testicular weight and histopathological readings under light microscope of both control and study group were recorded and analyzed. The results of experimental data can be summarized as follows : 1. The average testicular weight of control group increased progressively until sixth week to 1. 1.43gm from the initial value of 1.26gm, while the weight of study group decreased to 0.96gm which was 67.1 % of age-matched control group. 2. There were almost no remarkable changes between both groups in terms of number, size and cellularity of seminiferous tubules. We observed the degenerative and regenerative changes simultaneously in spermatogonia and spermatocytes. During the first three weeks, degenerative changes took place while the regenerative changes started from the second week and have fully recovered at the sixth week. And, the number of spermatids and spermatozoa slightly decreased at the first week, but have recovered to normal value from the second week. 3. There were noticeable changes neither in the interstitium of testes except the minimal edema nor in terms of size and number of Leydig cell. The results using rats showed the discordance with those of human study of prostatic cancer patient. This conflict can be attributed to the functional differences of leuprolide action between two species, age of sacrificed rats and insufficiency of dose and time of administration. However, we can draw another conclusion that the leuprolide acetate is expected to have no significant adverse effects to the spermatogenesis in cryptorchism treatment.