The Morphological Heterogeneity after Castration in the Rat Prostatic Gland

Lee, Gil Ho; Woo, Do Shik; Kim, Hyung Jee

Abstract

PURPOSE: Prostate is a well known androgen dependent accessary sex organ and androgen plays major roles in growth and development of prostate. While rat prostate has been the focus of many studies on androgen action and prostatic carcinogenesis, little is known of the pattern of regional variation and lobe-specific morphologic difference. Therefore, the study was designed to determine the morphologic differences in the proximal and distal duct, and in the ventral lobe and coagulating gland after castration through use of a microdissection method.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
Male Sprague-Dawley rats were used in all studies. The morphologic changes evaluated at 4, 7, 14 days after castration.
RESULTS
Wet weights of the ventral prostatic lobes in 7-, 14-day-post castration group were significantly different from control group(p=0.0001, ANOVA test), respectively. After castration the distal ducts may seemed to be melted down into the proximal ducts and tall simple columnar epithelial cells of distal duct changed into cuboidal cells. The distal duct of the castration groups showed decrease in ductal diameter, the numbers of cell and reduction of epithelial cell height. But these changes were not predominant in the proximal ducts of both lobes. There was no morphological difference between the ventral lobe and the coagulating gland after the orchiectomy.
CONCLUSIONS
This study demonstrated that the androgen was a very important hormone to maintain the prostate gland. There was a morphological heterogeneity between the proximal and the distal ducts. We suggested that the regional variation in androgen responsiveness may provide an appropriate model for the study of androgen independent prostatic cell survival.