Endocrine Abstracts

Background: Pituitary adenomas in children/adolescents represent around 3% of all intracranial neoplasms. They are more frequently hormone-secreting lesions, usually diagnosed in early childhood and late adolescence. Female gender is generally prevalent, because of most evident symptoms (i.e., irregular periods, galactorrhea, etc.). Giant pituitary adenomas (GA) very rarely occur in pediatric age, posing frequent challenges in their management.Patients a...

Context: Chronic hypercortisolism is known to impact the hypothalamus-pituitary-thyroid (HPT) axis, through a disruption of both thyrotropin-releasing-hormone and thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) release. These changes, in turn, are responsible for reduced triiodothyronine (T3) and thyroxine (T4) synthesis and secretion, eventually resulting in central hypothyroidism (C-Hypo). However, data on magnitude and timing of recovery of the above abnormalities are still controversial...

Pasireotide is the first pituitary-directed approved therapy for Cushing’s disease (CD), effective in reducing UFC >50% in about half of patients, and with a good tolerability profile but associated with a relatively high incidence of hyperglicemia. The aim of this study was to evaluate efficacy and safety of long-term treatment with pasireotide (PAS) in patients with CD. Methods: We retrospectively evaluated 17 consecutive patients (11 females) with CD treated with P...

Background: Craniopharingioma patients frequently experience severe obesity, unresponsive to caloric restriction or lifestyle modifications. Recently very-low-ketogenic-diets (VLCKD) proved to be a promising lifestyle intervention for obesity management, but no data are available regarding their effect on hypothalamic obesity (HO).Introduction: We present the outcome of VLCKD protocol applied in young patients with HO following neurosurgery for craniopha...

Rationale: Pituitary neuroendocrine tumors (PitNets) are aggressive in 20% of cases, with local invasion, relapse/scarce response to conventional treatment, in the absence of reliable predictive parameters. In 2018, Trouillas et al. proposed a 5-tier prognostic classification, not widely validated yet. In our study we evaluated the outcomes of a PitNets monocentric series in the context of this classification.Materials & Methods: We retrospe...

Background: The advances in next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies and bioinformatic analysis have shed light on genetic alterations, either of germline or somatic origin, in many disorders, including adrenocortical diseases. However, our knowledge on genomic characteristics in benign adrenal tumors of serendipitous discovery (adrenal incidentalomas) remain scarce.The aim of this study was to understand the pathogenic role of germline variants in adrenal incidentalomas....

Background: A recent cross-sectional study showed that both comorbidities and mortality in patients with adrenal incidentaloma (AI) are tied to sex. However, only few longitudinal studies evaluating the development of arterial hypertension, hyperglycemia, dyslipidemia and bone impairment in patients with AI are available. The aim of this study is to analyze the impact of sex in the development of these comorbidities during long-term follow-up.Patients an...

Background: Whether environmental pollution may influence adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) development remains largely unknown. The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of exposition to environmental pollutants on ACC presentation and prognosis in Italy.Patients and methods: A retrospective analysis was done on 500 patients affected by ACC, who were diagnosed in 12 reference centers in Italy from 1990 to 2018 and followed-up for a median of 37.5 mo...