Abstract
Sialadenosis, also referred to as sialosis, is a disease of unknown aetiology. It
regularly manifests itself as a massive swelling in both parotid regions involving
the major salivary glands, preferably the parotid glands and is characterized by lack
of any detectable, underlying pathologies. In this case report we describe a 24-year-old
white female patient with diabetes insipidus who developed sialadenosis of the major
salivary glands during a period of enhanced water requirement, which the patient tried
to compensate for by more frequent nasal ADH application. Since ADH acts on aquaporins
(AQPs) in the kidney, we were interested if AQP expression in the patients salivary
glands was affected. Surprisingly, compared to normal control tissues we observed
an extensively high signal for AQP5, which is the dominant AQP found in salivary acinar
cells. Interestingly, previous studies on AQP5 knock out mice found AQP5 to be required
for cell volume regulation. We therefore suggest that aquaporin water channels and
antidiuretic hormone together with a disturbance in the body's water household are
potential key-factors in the pathophysiological events leading to the development
of the disease entity called sialadenosis.
Key words
Aquaporin - AQP5 - ADH - sialadenosis - sialosis
References
mandic@med.uni-marburg.de
