Endocrine Abstracts

Alan McNeilly, MRC Human Reproduction Sciences Unit, Edinburgh, UK AbstractAfter graduating from Nottingham (BSc) and Reading (PhD) Universities with degrees in animal physiology, Dr McNeilly joined Tim Chard at Barts for 4 years developing gonadotrophin and prolactin assays for clinical application. During those 4 years he gained experience in clinical endocrinology. Collaborations with Roger Short and David Baird led...

Conservation is a tricky subject to discuss when people actually are asked to consider the present situation, and the virtual world that many live in today. Many of the losses of species are due to human intervention, through killing for pleasure, food, or profit (greed), or through habitat destruction. The species are innocent. Zoos provide a sanctuary for maintaining some numbers of species on a limited scale, but can only ever be a stop-gap to maintain the species, although...

Physical activity is any body movement produced by the skeletal muscle and that results in a substantial increase over the resting energy expenditure (REE). Training is physical activity and systematic, specialized practice for a specific sport discipline. This activity may have an effect on growth and biological maturation of young athletes. For males the more successful age group athletes are on-time or advanced in biological maturation, but the opposite is true (on-time or ...

This short presentation will consider the fact that many adults underestimate children’s ability to understand many things – this works in two ways, sometimes children understand more, and sometimes less than we might imagine – and by doing so may cause upset and misunderstanding. In any case we will see that all of us, including children, try to make sense of our surroundings, of new information, and of what happens to us, and children, in particular, need a ce...

Birth of a single baby gives that infant the best possible start to life. In mono-ovular species like man there is a tight control over the hypothalamic–pituitary–ovarian axis to try to ensure that there is also sufficient time between births to allow the infant to develop to its full potential. Breastfeeding suppresses fertility by modulating pulsatile LH but not FSH secretion delaying the final stages of ovarian follicle maturation and the return of fertility in br...

Mitotane is an inhibitor of adrenal steroidogenesis with cytostatic activity used in the adjuvant and palliative treatment of adrenocortical cancer. Evidence shows that achieving a therapeutic range of between 14 and 20 mg/l is associated with optimal disease control whereas blood levels above this can result in more severe gastrointestinal and neurological toxicity. Therapeutic drug monitoring is available but in real life achieving and remaining within the ideal range can be...

It is well recognised that the intestinal epithelium has a remarkable capacity to regenerate after high levels of DNA damage or injury. Although the kinetics of this ‘clonogenic repopulation’ whereby a new stem cell repopulates the crypt is understood, little is known about the molecular mechanism underlying this, although upregulation of Musashi-1 is known to mark the process. By conditionally deleting genes that are lethal to the intestinal stem cells we have mimic...

A 54-year-old gentleman presented with increased urinary frequency, urgency and nocturia. His GP treated him for benign prostatic hypertrophy with tamsulosin. When this failed to alleviate his symptoms he was referred to urology. Investigations revealed he was drinking in excess of 6 litres of fluid per day, hence he was referred to endocrinology.Aside from a 6-month history of polyuria and polydipsia, there was no history of previous head injury, headac...

Adrenocortical carcinomas (ACCs) are a group of aggressive neuroendocrine cancers that affect 1-2 people/million/year (1) and are mostly diagnosed in advanced stages. ACCs have poor overall survival (OS) rates (2). This study aimed to determine potential factors influencing OS of ACC patients in Yorkshire by a retrospective investigation of potential factors and OS of all 30 adult patients with ACC seen at St James University Hospital (SJUH) from 01/01/2000 to 01/10/2021. Anal...

Neuroendocrine tumours presenting in the bronchial or gastrointestinal tract often present with metastatic disease. Whereas well recognised sites of metastases include liver, lymph nodes and bones, they can also arise in unusual locations sometimes causing difficulties in diagnosis. The breast is an uncommon site for neuroendocrine tumour metastasis with estimates that it represents 0.1% of all breast tumours. Due to the low incidence of these neoplasms and due to difficulties...