Endocrine Abstracts

Background: Acromegaly is associated with an increased left ventricular mass, as reported in echo-based and more recently in few cardiac MRI studies. One possible explanation of this increased ventricular mass could be water retention and consequently edema of the ventricular wall.Methods: In this prospective, cross-sectional study 26 patients with active acromegaly and 31 control subjects of comparable age and sex were investigated by cardiac MRI. Patie...

BackgroundVitamin D has shown to play a role in multiple diseases due to its skeletal and extraskeletal actions (such as immunomodulation). In this sense, vitamin D deficiency has become a worldwide health issue. Few supplementation guidelines mention calcifediol treatment, its optimal dosing and treatment duration, despite being the direct precursor of calcitriol and the biomarker of vitamin D status.Objectives<p class="abstex...

The coexistence of pheochromocytoma and hyperreninemia secondary to renal artery stenosis, which both represent important causes of juvenile hypertension, has been reported in Literature, while association between pheochromocytoma and reninoma has never been described.We evaluated a 24-year-old boy, which came to our attention for severe hypertension, unresponsive to anti-hypertensive polytherapy. In 1996, because of elevated calcitonin levels (180 pg/ml...

Hirsutism affects 5–10% of women of reproductive age and may be the initial sign of an androgen disorder. We describe two cases of occult Sertoli-Leydig ovarian cell tumor suspected only on the basis of clinical and laboratory features.The first patient, a 42 year-old woman came to our attention for hirsutism. Several blood samples showed a very high testosterone concentration (~4 ng/ml), while non-ovarian causes of hyperandrogenism were excluded. A...

Hyperthyroidism associated to hyperthyrotropinemia is a rare condition which can be due to two different causes: resistance to thyroid hormones and TSH secreting adenoma. The differential diagnosis is not easy.We have observed 8 patients with hyperthyroidism associated to inappropriately elevated TSH. All patients had similar basal levels of thyroid hormones and 7 out of 8 had a multinodular goiter.Four out of 8 patients showed lac...

Aim: We compared effectiveness of partial withdrawal of levothyroxine (L-T4) to the use of recombinant human TSH (rhTSH) in preparation for Tg testing. We also evaluated clinical aspects and quality-of-life (QOL) during both regimens.Materials and methods: Ten consecutive patients, previously treated with total thyroidectomy and radioiodine ablation for DTC, underwent rhTSH protocol and, after 15 days, reduced their L-T4 dose by 50% for 5 weeks. At the f...

Abstract unavailable....

Context: Pituitary tumorigenesis does not fit into the most common model of cancer development driven by gene mutations. Instead, epigenetic mechanisms have been widely involved. Among them, aberrant DNA methylation at CpG sites is one of epigenetic hallmarks of tumour cells. There are several methods to study the epigenetic regulation of genome activity, from DNA methylation arrays to more specific DNA methylation analysis such as pyrosequencing, Methylation-Specific PCR (MS-...

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is becoming a master component of the epidemic of obesity and metabolic syndrome worldwide due to excessive caloric intake. The spectrum of NAFLD ranges from simple fatty liver with benign prognosis to a potentially progressive form, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), which may lead to liver fibrosis and cirrhosis resulting in increased morbidity and mortality. Development of hepatic steatosis and its progression to steatohepatitis ma...

Large randomized studies have established that early intensive glycemic control reduces the risk of diabetic complications, both micro and macrovascular. However, epidemiological and prospective data support a long-term influence of early metabolic control on clinical outcomes. This phenomenon has recently been defined as ‘Metabolic Memory.’ It was first hypothesized by Brownlee (Nature 2000), and since shown by many researchers that overproduction of free radicals, ...