Hormonal status of breast cancer. I. Thoretical basis for the analysis of steroid profile.

Gas-liquid chromatography was applied to the analysis of urinary steroids of women. In the statistical analysis, quantitation of all steroid excretions and ratios among them were transformed to give a normal frequency distribution. The influence of the host's age and the menstrual cycle on 24 hours' excretion was investigated for each of 14 identified neutral steroids, of which four in our fraction 2 (11-hydroxyandrosterone, 11-hydroxyetiocholanolone, pregnanediol, and pregnanetriol) were menstruation dependent. The 14 neutral steroid excretions were generally correlated with one another within the host, and the use of a steroid ratio rather than quantitation of steroid excretion was often more sensitive in the characterization of the hormonal status.