Chasalow et al. (2025). Physiology. doi: 10.5772/intechopen.1010206
…a local slaughterhouse near San Francisco. Six compounds were isolated to near purity. No SPCDs with 24 carbon atoms were identified. More recently, we isolated SPCDs from bovine adrenals obtained from Pel-Freeze, Little Rock, AK, at Coddle Creek Laboratories. These samples included SPCDs with both 23 carbon atoms and 24 carbon atoms. This discrepancy in isolated SPCDs was attributed to the endocrinological and…
Pel-Freez products cited: Bovine Adrenal (57101)
Abstract
Preeclampsia affects 5–8% of pregnant women. It is characterized by hypertension and proteinuria after 20 weeks of gestation and is attributed to abnormal placental formation and development. This perspective chapter presents a new hypothesis concerning the biochemical mechanism of preeclampsia, reversing the postulated link between abnormal placental formation and its biochemical cause. We discovered two new types of steroids that function with non-genomic mechanisms. The steroids are phosphodiesters of steroids with 23 or 24 carbon atoms. One type has a lactone E-ring similar to spironolactone; the second type has a carboxyl group instead of the lactone. We also propose a biosynthetic pathway for these steroids. The compounds with 23 carbon atoms match up with the maternal isoforms of the sodium-potassium pump NaK-ATPase and epithelial sodium channel ENaC. These two proteins are the primary maternal regulators of potassium during pregnancy. The 24-carbon compounds match the corresponding fetal isoforms of the two proteins. These studies suggest that the symptoms of preeclampsia result from inadequate synthesis of the 24-carbon compounds and over production of the 23-carbon compounds. Accordingly, pre-eclampsia may no longer be a syndrome but a series of biosynthetic defects in a previously unknown steroid biosynthetic pathway. We thus propose that the specific defect in the pathway may result in a loss-of-function mutation of 16α-hydroxylase, which could also cause estriol deficiency, which may underlie the inadequate placentation observed in preeclampsia.