Endocrine Abstracts

There is a well-recognised association between Coeliac disease and type 1 diabetes (T1DM). Four of our 68 patients have both conditions (5.9%). We present three other patients with T1DM and GI disease – two inflammatory bowel disease (IBD=2.9%) and one primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) and IBD (=1.5%).Case 1: Sixteen years old male, with T1DM from 13-year-old, developed diarrhoea and abdominal pain with no weight loss or blood pr. Investigation s...

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...

The immune dysregulation, polyendocrinopathy and enteropathy, X-linked syndrome (IPEX), is a rare and devastating condition of male infants. Immune mediated diabetes and enteropathy occur before 6 months of age and other manifestations include hypothyroidism, recurrent infections and eczema. In 2001, IPEX was mapped to Xp11, an orthologous region to that for the murine model of T cell dysregulation, scurfy, and mutations in the forkhead transcription factor gene, FOXP3,...

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...

Graves' disease (GD) is inherited as a complex trait and previous studies have identified linkage and association of both GD and type 1 diabetes to markers on chromosome 18q21. A candidate gene for autoimmunity that is contained within the critical interval on 18q21 is the apoptosis regulator 'Deleted in Colorectal Carcinoma' (DCC).317 Graves' disease probands and 311 controls were genotyped for a single nucleotide polymorphism that encodes a glycine to ...

Background: IGF-1 is a ubiquitous growth factor that has been shown to play an important role in breast tissue development and tumorigenesis. Previously we have shown that IGF-1 expression is lost in approximately 1/3 of breast carcinomas. It is unsure whether this indicates the existence of a subset of breast cancers that may behave differently clinically and on a molecular level. Aims: To assess and quantify the mRNA expression of (i) Cox-2 and c-myc, genes imp...

It has been reported that Ang II induces the growth of MCF-7 breast cancer cells (Muscella et al., J Endocrinol 173, 315-323, 2002). Here we have examined the signalling pathways evoked by Ang II in MCF-7. Ang II did not change the concentration of intracellular calcium but induced the cytosol-to-membrane translocation of atypical protein kinase C zeta (PKC-zeta). Ang II dose-dependently induced c-fos (mRNA and protein) and enhanced the phosphorylation state of extracellular s...

Background: PCO is more prevalent among SA than C and IR is central to its pathogenesis; whilst Type 2 diabetes (DM) is commoner in SA. We compared the phenotype and IR in South Asian and Caucasians with PCOS.Methods: Comparison of consecutive anovular PCOS; 47 SA and 36 Caucasians and their age and weight matched controls (11 SA and 22 Cs).Results: SA presented earlier (age 26 plus/minus 4 v 30.1 plus/minus 5, p = 0.005). BMI (24....

Interferon alpha (IFNα) and Ribavirin combination therapy effectively eradicates Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) in up to 80% of patients. Transient thyroid dysfunction (TD) (>80% hypothyroidism) usually due to a destructive thyroiditis has been recognised to occur in up to 25% of patients treated in Italy, Japan and Australia. However, data are lacking in a UK cohort and no standardised protocol for testing of thyroid function testing exists. The aim of this study was to det...

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 ...