Somatostatin inhibits pepsinogen secretion via a cyclic AMP-independent pathway.

Frog esophageal mucosa contains peptide glands which release pepsinogen in response to a variety of secretagogues and serves as a model to examine the inhibitory action of somatostatin. The pepsinogen secretion in response to bethanechol was inhibited by somatostatin in a noncompetitive fashion. The maximal response induced by bethanechol was reduced and the EC50 for bethanechol was increased in the presence of somatostatin. On the other hand, somatostatin showed essentially no effect on pepsinogen release evoked by ionophore A23187, dibutyryl cAMP or by forskolin in the presence of atropine. Atropine was included in the incubation mixture to eliminate the effect of acetylcholine released by forskolin from the intrinsic cholinergic neurons also present in the mucosa. Somatostatin did not exert any significant effect on the basal or the forskolin-stimulated cAMP accumulation in the mucosa, nor the basal or the forskolin-stimulated adenylate cyclase activity in the membranes of the peptic cells isolated from the mucosa. Thus, these results seem to suggest that somatostatin inhibits pepsinogen secretion from frog esophageal mucosa by a cAMP-independent pathway.