LHRH: clinical applications growing

Barely 13 years after its initial discovery, the hypothalamic luteinizing-hormone releasing hormone (LHRH) appears to be claiming a large territory in clinical medicine. "There's almost no subspecialty of medicine that will be left untouched by the [research] advances associated with LHRH or its analogues," predicts William F. Crowley, MD, associate professor of medicine at Harvard University Medical School, Boston. He points out that this polypeptide hormone (also known as gonadotropin-releasing hormone or GnRH) is already providing new treatments for several human diseases and "represents one of the examples where an investment in basic science has profound clinical applications." Crowley, who is also chief of reproductive endocrinology at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, discussed the therapeutic implications of LHRH and its analogues at the Seventh International Congress of Endocrinology in Quebec City. So far, he says, the ability of LHRH to either stimulate or suppress reproductive processes has been applied