A critical appraisal of studies of the pancreas

This article suggests that for the concept of feedback regulation of the pancreas the application of animal data to humans has obvious limitations. The introduction of the synthetic protease inhibitor camostate (FOY 305) offered the possibility of designing studies in animals and man using the same compound as tool thus allowing reliable comparisons between the different experiments. These experiments revealed that cholecystokinin (CCK) has a dominant role in rats but it has no proven significance for feedback regulation in humans. The existence of such species differences should be kept in mind in studies dealing with pancreatic secretion, growth, pancreatitis, cancer, or related questions.