Evidence for a role of vasopressin in the control of aldosterone secretion in primary aldosteronism: in vitro and in vivo studies

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Vasopressin, published as a randomized controlled trial.

The objective of the study was to investigate in vitro and in vivo the possible involvement of AVP in the physiopathology of primary aldosteronism.

Why It Was Studied

Arginine vasopressin (AVP) stimulates steroid secretion from the normal human adrenal gland and some cortisol-producing adrenocortical tumors or hyperplasia through activation of the V(1a) receptor.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as middle-aged adults, both men and women.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled and crossover.

Because people in this Vasopressin study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Neither the participants nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Vasopressin, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

The comparison arm used a placebo, so changes seen with Vasopressin could be set against what happens without it.

In the crossover set-up each of the participants took both Vasopressin and the comparison in turn, acting as their own control.

The study was conducted at a university hospital and research laboratory.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Adenoma, Adrenocorticotropic Hormone, Aldosterone, Fluorescent Antibody Technique, Hormone Antagonists, Hyperaldosteronism and Immunohistochemistry.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Vasopressin.

Its findings take up roughly 6 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2006 (The Journal of clinical endocrinology and metabolism), a journal based in United States.

More context: the Vasopressin compound page, all human trials.