Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH) and insulin-like factor 3 (INSL3) represent ovarian functional markers of granulosa and theca cells respectively. This study investigated AMH and INSL3 plasma levels in two groups of ovulatory or anovulatory women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), and their relationship with ovarian morphology and androgen levels.Methods: AMH and INSL3 were measured in a cohort of 57 patients with PCOS classified in two gro...

Tissue inflammation is usually transient but in diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA) inflammation persists. It remains unclear why inflammation persists in some tissues and not in others. Recent studies have shown that stromal cells such as fibroblasts play a pivotal role in determining this persisitance. We have hypothesized that glucocorticoid (GC) activation via the enzyme 11beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 1 (11beta-HSD1) within fibroblasts plays a key role in ...

Increasing evidences indicate that brown adipose tissue (BAT) functional activity is reduced during obesity. The nature of this deficit in BAT function, however, is still poorly understood. To analyze whether insulin function in the BAT is altered during obesity, we studied the in vivo metabolic activity of BAT by PET/CT imaging and euglycaemic hyperinsulinemic clamp in lean and diet-induced obese mice. Three groups of mice were analyzed after administration of different diet ...

The aim of this epidemiologic study, performed in a wide population of high-school students in Northern Italy, was to obtain an unbiased estimate of the prevalence of hyperandrogenic states in adolescents and young females.2052 female students, aged 15–19 years, were consecutively contacted. 939/2052 (45.8%) refused to participate in the study, but 431 of the 939 non-participants (45.9%) agreed to fill out a brief questionnaire aimed to broadly asse...

Introduction: Within the high prevalence of male infertility there is the rare 45,X/46,XY mosaicism, associated or not with hypogonadism. The phenotypes of this genetical disorder present with a wide variability ranging from Turner stigmata to apparent normal male.Case report: Two men who presented with azoospermia in the context of couple infertility were subsequently found to be affected by 45,X/46,XY mosaicism. Physical examination revealed a complete...

Background and aim: Epicardial fat (EF) is a metabolically active organ as well as visceral fat (VF). EF has been recognized as a potential additional marker of cardiac risk in obesity and type 2 diabetes. This study wants to assess the relation between EF and VF and the correlation with nutritional and hormonal parameters.Material and Methods: Fifty-nine overweight/obese women were enrolled in the study. All women underwent anthropometric measurements, ...

Aim: This study was aimed to estimate the nutritional status and the prevalence of weight excess in a wide unselected population of adolescent and young students from Emilia Romagna.Material and methods: Three thousand and ninety-one high school students, aged 15–19 years were consecutively contacted. One thousand eight hundred sixty out of 3091 (60.2%) accepted to participate in an epidemiologic study, whose procedures included anthropometric measu...

Congenital morphological alteration of pituitary gland is a rare disease often associated with isolated or multiple hormonal deficiency. So far only few genes have been shown to be implicated in a small number of these cases.Aim of this study was to evaluate putative genetic alteration by an array-based comparative genomic hybridization (array-CGH) in 19 adulthood patients, 16 males and 3 females, affected by congenital morphological alteration of the pi...

Brown adipose tissue (BAT) is an insulin sensitive organ having a very high uptake of glucose per gram of tissue. The role of insulin on glucose uptake in BAT is still poorly understood, moreover, it is not clear whether BAT insulin function is compromised with obesity. We used a small animal PET/CT imaging approach to analyse insulin function in vivo in lean and obese mice using a glucose analogue PET tracer (18F-FDG). Three groups of mice were analysed afte...

Insulin-like factor 3 (INSL3), a member of the relaxin-insulin family, is produced in the Leydig cells and at reduced levels in ovarian thecal cells. As ovaries from most of PCOS are characterized by an hyperplasia of the theca interna, we hypothesized that INSL3 could be overproduced in PCOS women and therefore that circulating levels of this hormone could became a new marker for the syndrome. Forty lean and obese women with PCOS and 20 controls comparable for age and weight ...