Effects of iodine deficiency and high-fat diet on N-nitrosomethylurea-induced mammary cancers in rats.

The effects of an altered content of dietary iodine and fat on the development of N-nitrosomethylurea-induced mammary tumors in rats were studied and correlated with thyroid and pituitary function studies. In three separate experiments, animals fed a semisynthetic diet containing 11.8% fat had an earlier time of tumor appearance and greater tumor burden than did controls maintained on a diet containing 4.6% fat. These diet-associated changes were markedly inhibited by ovariectomy, indicating that the tumor growth was hormone responsive. We examined the possibility that the diet with increased fat content enhanced tumor growth through alterations in prolactin metabolism but could find no consistent elevation in serum prolactin and no increase in pituitary prolactin synthesis in vitro. Our data further showed that rats on an iodine-deficient form of the high-fat diet had no greater tumor growth than did animals receiving an iodine-supplemented form of the same diet. We conclude from these results that iodine deficiency does not promote mammary tumorigenesis. An incidental finding of great interest was that ovariectomy led to a highly significant depression of thyroid-stimulating hormone production in vitro. This suggests that estrogens may directly influence thyroid-stimulating hormone synthesis in vivo and thus contribute to the sex-related differences in thyroid physiology.