Grishma Parikh, MD

Mentors   Dr. Poretsky, Dr. Tolbert & Dr. Seto-Young

Recent Work

As a Friedman fellow, I worked in endocrinology laboratory at Beth Israel Medical Center under guidance from my mentor Dr. Seto-Young.

My primary area of interest was looking at effect of Vitamin D on steroid hormone production in human ovarian cells. We were testing the hypothesis that Vitamin D receptor is present in human ovarian cells and vitamin D has a physiological role in steroidogenesis, based on animal data that mice lacking vitamin D receptor were infertile and had low estrogen levels. This hypothesis was tested on cultured human ovarian and purified granulose cells by incubating cells with different concentrations of Vitamin D. Our results confirm presence of vitamin D receptor in human ovarian cells. In our experiments Vitamin D stimulated production of estradiol, estrone and progesterone by ovarian cells and purified human granulose cells. We also showed that vitamin D enhanced insulin induced estradiol production in human granulose cells, suggesting some effect on enhancement of insulin action possibly insulin sensitizing effect. Currently we are looking at possible mechanism of vitamin D effect on ovarian cells, specifically effect on expression of StAR protein, 3B-Hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase enzyme and aromatase expression.