Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Atherosclerosis is a chronic inflammatory arterial disease and is currently one of the most common causes of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality worldwide. Therefore, there is an urgent need to discover new therapeutic targets for treatment of this fatal chronic disease. Fatty acid binding protein 4 (FABP4), a pro-inflammatory adipokine that links obesity with its related metabolic diseases, has been implicated in the development of atherosclerosis. This study...

Introduction: Adipocyte fatty acid binding protein (A-FABP) is a fatty acid chaperone that facilitates the efflux of free fatty acid from cytoplasm into circulation. Previous studies show that A-FABP knockout (KO) mice are more susceptible to diet-induced obesity comparing to wild type (WT) littermates. Here we investigate the underlying mechanism of A-FABP in the regulation of diet-induced obesity.Methods: A-FABP KO mice and their WT littermates were fe...

Background: Thyroid hormones increase both serum levels of cystatin C and renal glomerular filtration rate (reflected by lower serum creatinine); the latter is considered the main determinant of cystatin C levels. A potential explanation for this apparently discrepant finding is an increased production, rather than a decreased clearance, of cystatin C. To study whether 3,3′,5-triiodo-L-thyronine (T3) increases the production of cystatin C in a w...

Background: Mitotane antitumor efficacy is related to plasma levels. Objective responses have been associated with mitotane plasma levels >14 mg/l. However, high plasma levels >20 or >30 mg/l are at higher risk of toxicity, especially neurotoxicity. National-based survey is lacking to evaluate the frequency and severity of high mitotane plasma levels. Our aim was to retrospectively describe serious adverse events (SAE).Methods: Mitotane plasm...

Introduction: In endocrine tumours, such as that of the breast, the protein survivin has emerged as a unique regulator of cell death. We have previously shown that bFGF regulates survivin expression through the MAP kinase cascade. The transcriptional complex myc/max is an oncogene that lies downstream of the MAP kinase pathway suggesting a possible role in survivin's regulation.Aim: To determine if bFGF can mediate survivin expression by signalling throu...

CDGP is a common growth disorder, often dominantly inherited. Genetic association is thus very likely. There are many possible candidates but none are yet linked to CDGP. We assessed the possible contribution of L, LR genes (mutations in each cause very delayed or absent puberty), CART (mediates the effect of L on GnRH pulse generation), and GPR54 (a hypothalamic G-protein coupled receptor, which is mutated in familial hypogonadotrophic hypogonadism) genes.<p class="abstex...

Introduction: Medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC) and C cell hyperplasia (CCH) have a variable clinical presentation and prognosis and few data are available on the correlation between immunohistochemical characterization (IIC) and clinical behavior.Aim: We studied the clinical and morphological characterization of CCH and MTC and we evaluated IIC expression of PTTG-1, SSTR2A, VEGFR-1, VEGFR-2 and VEGFR-3 in 23 cases of CCH and/or MTC, correlating it with ...

The importance of the sRANK-L / RANK / Osteoprotegerin (OPG) system in osteoclast function has clearly been demonstrated in the rat. Activating and inactivating mutations lead to severe disturbances of bone remodelling.Since this early animal work, there have been several studies designed to assess the importance of sRANK-L / RANK / OPG in diseases of the human skeleton. sRANK-L and OPG are measurable in blood.This cross-sectional ...

In pregnant women with thyroid diseases an increased amount of LT4 may be required for the correction of hypothyroidism or treatment of nodular goiter. Aim of this study was to assess the amount of the variations of LT4 requirement in pregnant women with thyroid diseases. To address this issue, we retrospectively evaluated a cohort of 107 women treated with LT4 divided in two groups: 42 euthyroid (E) (affected by nodular goiter (NG) treated with LT4 suppressive therapy) and 65...

Aims/hypothesis: Several data have shown the association between diabetes type 2 (DM2) and transcription factor 7-like 2 (TCF7L2) gene polymorphisms, in several and different ethnical populations. Although the pathophysiology is not completely clear, it seems that beta and alpha cell functions are abnormal. Up to these days there is no clinical data showing association between TCF7L2 gene polymorphism allele rs7903146 T and beta cell insulin and C-peptide contents in DM2 patie...