Debbie -
Thank you for posting this. I will confess at first to being put off by the lack of references, then I realized that it may have just been that the the link to the "original article" (perhaps in Dr. Tennant's old Journal of Practical Pain Management?) was broken.
First of all, it's odd that we haven't heard about a study that miraculously restored the spines of 11/16 rats using a therapy based on a naturally occurring hormone. I just ran a PubMed search on "Pregnenolone rat spine" and got zero hits, which means that if the study was published, it didn't make it into a peer reviewed journal.
But the use of adrenal hormone [in effect: steroid] replacement therapy is one that has in fact been around for a long time and was discussed most recently in the "cortisteroids"
http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/thread89769.html and "Prednisone"
http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/sh...hlight=steroid threads back in June. I suppose what Dr. Tennant is trying to do is bring our attention back a therapy that worked, at least to at least a certain extent, but has apparently fallen out of fashion with the passage of time, see, e.g., "The reflex dystrophy syndrome response to treatment with systemic corticosteroids," Christensen K, Jensen EM, Noer I,
Acta. Chir. Scand., 1982;148(8):653-5:
Twenty-three patients with reflex dystrophy syndrome were randomly allocated to medication with oral prednisone, 10 mg thrice daily, or placebo, previous reports having indicated effect of systemic corticosteroids. The medication was continued until clinical remission, maximally 12 weeks. The diagnosis was based on fulfillment of at least four of seven criteria which included clinical, radiological and circulatory changes. All 13 patients in the prednisone-treated group showed more than 75% clinical improvement within the twelve-week period. Of the ten patients who received placebo, only two reported improvement. Prednisone appears to be superior to other treatment in reflex dystrophy syndrome, although the mode of action is not known.
PMID: 6763435 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez
Which was, in turn, recently referenced in "Pharmacologic Management of Complex Regional Pain Syndrome," Rowbotham MC,
Clin J Pain, 2006;22:425-429 at 426:
Steroids have been and continue to be administered by multiple routes for CRPS therapy. After early reports of success with systemic steroids, Christensen et al studied 23 patients and reported that 30 mg/d of oral prednisone was significantly better than placebo. [Footnotes omitted.]
http://www.rsds.org/2/library/articl...mgnts_crps.pdf
For more background on this, you might want to look at the response Jules put up a couple of years ago in a (very) short thread I started on the topic:
http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/thread9659.html. I'm seeing my PM doc in the morning and if he can shine any further light on what happened to the technique, and why, I'll get back to you.
(Meanwhile, if anyone happens to be in contact with a doctor in the field who is sufficiently long in the tooth, I would urge you to ask the same question.)
Mike