The influence of bilateral prefrontal lobotomy on thyroid activity in psychiatric patients.

Abstract

FOR many years the literature on schizophrenia, as well as that concerned with the other psychoses, has contained reports tending to implicate the various endocrine organs in these illnesses. More recently, attempts to explain the effects of electroshock therapy and prefrontal lobotomy have suggested that therapeutic changes in patients treated by these methods are associated with certain modifications in endocrine, including thyroid, function. Although there are few actual data to substantiate these speculations, a great deal of evidence has been collected, chiefly from animal experimentation, to indicate that the central nervous system plays a role in determining certain aspects of endocrine function. Harris's review of the neural control of the pituitary (1) presents inconclusive evidence in this regard, but Hume's (2) recent work is further evidence for some hypothalamic humoral control of anterior pituitary secretion of adrenocorticotropic hormone. The increased use of prefrontal lobotomy affords an ...