Compromised Rat Testicular Antioxidant Defence System by Hypothyroidism before Puberty

Table 4

Effect of neonatal PTU treatment on germ cell count (number/tubule) and seminiferous tubule diameter (expressed in μ) in Stage-VII seminiferous tubules of testes. Data are expressed as mean ± S.D. of 5 observations from five different animals and subjected to unpaired Student’s t-test. Each observation per animal is the mean of 30 observations. Statistical significance was accepted at 𝑃<0.05. Control and hypothyroid groups were found to differ significantly at 𝑃<0.05 as represented by superscripts of different letters. Group-I (control): 30-day-old control rats; Group-II (hypothyroid): 30-day-old rats with PTU treatment from day 1 postpartum to day 30 postpartum.

	Group-I (control)	Group-II (hypothyroid)
Primary spermatogonia (number/tubule)	25.12 ± 0.41^a	19.11 ± 0.17^b
Number of spermatocytes (number/tubule)	15.77 ± 1.65^a	3.31 ± 0.33^b
Round spermatids (number/tubule)	46.50 ± 5.02^a	Nil^b
Sertoli cell number (number/tubule)	30.09 ± 0.34^a	39.05 ± 2.14^b
Seminiferous tubule diameter (μ)	121.13 ± 3.98^a	89.04 ± 3.82^b