Investigation of glucuronic acid metabolism in human subjects

Recent interest in the metabolism of glucuronic acid has been aroused mainly as a result of the real-ization (1) that the conjugation of glucuronic acid is an important step in the metabolism of estrogenic and steroid hormones (2, 3) and of epinephrine (4) and following the reports that glucuronic acid may be useful in arthritis (5). Although the mechanism of formation of glucuronides has been observed chiefly in studies of drug metabolism and has been widely accepted as a process of detoxica-tion, the view is now prevalent (6, 7, 8) that this reaction represents a physiological process which we consider a "metabolic conjugation " (1). Thus, it is believed that exogenous drugs are conjugated with glucuronic acid only by virtue of certain o