1992/03/01 by DS Jessop, D. S. Jessop, H.S. Chowdrey +5 · 5 citations
Medicine · #Hormonal Regulation and Hypertension #Pituitary Gland Disorders and Treatments #Adrenal Hormones and Disorders
paper · doi:10.1677/joe.0.1320331
Introduction Substance P (SP) is a bit like the fifth man in British espionage – around for a long time but never named. Because this peptide was originally discovered during the search for acetylcholine (Von Euler & Gaddum, 1931) and, much later, isolated and sequenced by a group more interested in corticotrophin-releasing factor (Chang, Leeman & Niall, 1971), one could be forgiven for thinking that it was decreed to remain anonymous as punishment for obstructing more urgent research. The truth is, however, that so many actions have been ascribed to SP that no sufficiently dominant function has arisen to justify the appellation of a descriptive noun. The properties of vasodilation and smooth muscle contraction are well known (Iversen, Watson, Sandberg et al. 1985), and SP is also strongly implicated in the process of nociception (Iversen, 1982). In addition to these classically described functions, closer attention has been paid more recently