Endocrine Abstracts

Understanding the mechanisms regulating pancreatic beta cell mass is a major challenge in pancreas biology with direct clinical implications for future therapies to diabetes. Key questions in this field regard the regenerative potential of beta cells, the identity of the cell of origin for regenerating beta cells and the nature of signals that govern beta cell homeostasis. We have developed a transgenic mouse system for conditional ablation of beta cells, ...

A fundamental problem in pancreas biology concerns the dynamics of beta cell mass regulation. While autoimmune or pharmacological destruction of beta cells appears to be irreversible, adult beta cell mass does respond to specific physiological cues such as insulin resistance. This raises the exciting possibility that beta cells have a significant regenerative capacity that could be used to treat diabetes. In support of this notion, recent studies in mouse models of diabetes su...

To explore the correlation structure of individual components of the Metabolic Syndrome and identify combinations of correlated variables we used principal component analysis (PCA) in a multiethnic group of women with a history of GDM (pGDM) (185 European, 103 South Asian, 80 African–Caribbean), recruited at 20.0 (18.2–22.1) months (geometric mean (95% CI)) after pregnancy and 482 control women of similar ethnicities. BMI, W:H ratio, systolic and diastolic BP, f. glu...