The secretory response of rat islets of Langerhans was examined during pregnancy and compared with insulin release in normal rat islets. The threshold for a secretory response to glucose was lowered for islets from pregnant rats by comparison with non-pregnant controls. In addition, such islets showed a greatly increased sensitivity to glucose concentrations over the range 3·5–20 mmol/1. Significantly lower fasting blood glucose levels were found in pregnant rats in vivo, compared with controls.
Insulin secretagogues other than glucose were tested for their effects on islets during pregnancy. Despite the high baseline of insulin secretion in response to glucose in pregnancy, there was an additional increased secretory response to arginine and theophylline. In contrast to their response to glucose, pregnant rat islets did not display an increased sensitivity to leucine. Glucagon, while it increased the insulin response of normal islets, had no significant effect on increasing the insulin response from pregnant rat islets suggesting that adenyl cyclase activity is already highly stimulated in pregnancy.
In addition, the insulin, DNA and protein content of islets during pregnancy were increased significantly above normal values.
The results suggested that rat islets are not only larger in pregnancy, but that they possess a more sensitive mechanism for detecting and responding to glucose and other secretagogues.
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