Читать книгу New Concepts for Human Disorders of Sexual Development - Группа авторов - Страница 32

After the postnatal activation in early infancy the testes become relatively quiescent during childhood due to a constant inhibition of the prepubertal HPG axis by hypothalamic neuronal circuits.

During this period, lasting to the first signs of pubertal activation, commercial assays of sexual hormones rarely catch elevated hormonal levels. However, employing methods with ultrahigh sensitivity and specificity, enabling limits of quantification in the low picomolar level for estrogens and sub picomolar level for androgens, it has been demonstrated that explicitly these sex hormones are detectable in prepubertal boys and girls and show gender differences in children before the appearance of any clinical signs of puberty [Courant et al., 2010].