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Thyroid Hormone Transport

1997; Springer Science+Business Media; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-642-60709-7_5

1865-0325

Jan R. Stockigt, C. F. Lim, John Barlow, Duncan J. Topliss,

Muscle metabolism and nutrition

It is now over half a century since it was shown that circulating thyroid hormones bind non-covalently to plasma proteins (Tervorrow 1938). The identity of these binding proteins in various species, the relationship of the free and bound hormone fractions to biological activity, the diagnostic importance of total or free hormone measurements, and the effects of other ligands which compete for specific hormone-binding sites have been extensively studied. Numerous hereditary variations in the three major human thyroid hormone-binding proteins have been described (see Refetoff 1989, 1994; Bartalena 1990, 1994, for detailed reviews). In addition, the validity of the free hormone hypothesis, which holds that hormone delivery to tissues is a function of the free hormone concentration at equilibrium, has been extensively discussed (Pardridge 1981; Mendel 1989a; Ekins 1990).