Endocrine Abstracts

A 55-year-old female presented to the Endocrine Clinic with Graves’ disease which was treated with carbimazole for 18 months. Her initial symptoms were facial sweating and dry lips on background of a multinodular goitre confirmed on thyroid ultrasound. TSH was <0.01 mU/l, free T4 was 42.2, and free T3 18 pmol/l. Thyrotoxicosis recurred in an attempt to taper down the dose of carbimazole and a decision was made to proceed with radioactive iodine t...

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...

Case History: A 51 year old man was brought in by ambulance with new confusion was found to have hypoglycaemia with a blood glucose of 1.8. He was treated by paramedics. His PMHx included a recent diagnosis of solitary pleural fibrous tumour, recent diagnosis of epilepsy. The patient had been admitted to hospital 10 weeks ago with recurrent confusions. Collateral history unveiled visual hallucinations. He had recently lost unintentional weight. Random blood glucose at first pr...

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...