New research suggests the hormone kisspeptin shows promise as a potential new treatment for infertility.
The research is being presented at the annual Society for Endocrinology BES meeting in Harrogate. Scientists led by Dr Waljit Dhillo from Imperial College London, have shown that giving kisspeptin to women with infertility can activate the release of sex hormones which control the menstrual cycle. This research could lead to a new fertility therapy for women with low sex hormone levels.
Kisspeptin is a product of the KISS-1 gene and is a key regulator of reproductive function. Animals and humans lacking kisspeptin function do not go through puberty and remain sexually immature. In a previous study, Dr Waljit Dhillo and colleagues showed that kisspeptin treatment leads to the production of sex hormones in fertile women; they have now extended their research to look at the effects of kisspeptin in women whose periods have stopped due to a hormone imbalance.
In this study, funded by the Medical Research Council, The Wellcome Trust and National Institute for Health Research, a group of ten women who were not menstruating and infertile, were injected with either kisspeptin (n=5) or saline (control, n=5). Blood samples were then taken to measure their levels of luteinising hormone (LH) and follicle stimulating hormone (FSH), two sex hormones essential for ovulation and fertility. Kisspeptin led to a 48-fold increase in LH and 16-fold increase in FSH, when compared to the control treatment.
This is the first study to show that kisspeptin can stimulate sex hormones in women with infertility and presents kisspeptin as a potential new therapy for human infertility.
Researcher Dr Waljit Dhillo from the Department of Investigative Medicine at Imperial College London said: