Histopathological Characteristics of Folliculo-stellate Cells in Pituitary Glands of Wild Type, Obese and High-fat Diet Induced Mice

Abstract

The anterior pituitary gland regulates growth, metabolism, and reproductionby secreting hormones. Folliculo-stellate cells (FSC) are non-endocrinecells located among hormone-producing cells in the anterior pituitaryglands, but little is known about the exact roles of those cells. Although,with their net organization, they seem to have an important role in thehormonal cells regulation and maintenance. In this work, the first ever made in this area, 33 pituitaries of three groupsof mice (18 wild type [WT], 11 genetically obese [OB] and 4 under a highfat diet [HFD]) were studied in order to determine if there was any relationbetween the number of FSC and alterations of the basal metabolism in eachgroup of mice. For that, immunohistochemical staining using the S-100protein was used and also the Image-J software, to calculate the percentageof FSC present in each sample. The authors found that, although there wasn’t any significant differencebetween WT and OB mice, the group of HFD mice tend to havesubstantially higher percentage of FSC than the mice from other groups.This might suggest some yet unknown link between diet, precisely with ahigh-fat diet, and the presentation of FSC in the anterior pituitary.