Endocrine function as a target of perinatal drug effects: methodologic issues.
The goal of this chapter is to indicate potential endocrine targets of perinatal drug exposure, to describe the methodologic issues involved in detecting changes in hormone secretion, and to provide examples of several endocrine systems in which exposure to drugs during development significantly impaired normal endocrine development. Finally, we attempted to show that endocrine function is both a target and useful marker for detecting effects of drug of abuse on development that provides the advantages of accurate quantitation and relative response stability across ontogeny.
Animals↗