Patterns of LHβcf among women in health and disease

Urine based gonadotropin assays provide a practical means of analyzing hormone secretion patterns. While research protocols have revealed pulsatile patterns of gonadotropins such as LH in the blood, these assays are of limited clinical use since daily venipuncture sampling is not feasible outside of a research environment. However, collection of several urine samples provides a method to achieve the same visualization of gonadotropin patterns in patients using a convenient and generally applicable technique based on analysis of the highly stable hLHβcf for monitoring LH and hCGβcf for monitoring pituitary hCG. We demonstrated that two different sampling techniques for analyzing these gonadotropin metabolites yielded the same information on their excretory patterns, either sampling of spot urines or collecting first morning void urines for several days. Next, we studied the core excretory patterns in several populations: menstruating and postmenopausal women from the general population, and two populations of women from a fertility center, one of which had polycystic ovaries (PCO). The PCO population was also subdivided into those with and without insulin resistance (IR). It was found that our hLHβcf assay did not measure the form of the LH core (v-hLHβcf) produced in subjects who were homozygous for a variant form of LH (v-LH). None of our patients tested were homozygous for the variant form of LH. It was also found that in most non-PCO (NPCO) patients, the hLHβcf peak lasted for 7–9 days while among the PCO patients this peak frequently lasted for less than 7 days and an erratic pattern tended to appear. The overall differences in patterns between the PCO and NPCO patients were confirmed by spectral statistical methods. The prevalence of certain characteristic hLHβcf patterns may be higher among women with PCO with a more severe clinical presentation. Use of urinary analysis of gonadotropin metabolites, especially hLHβcf, may supplement subjective ultrasound studies with more sensitive biochemical measurements.