Endocrine Abstracts

Obesity, a disease that is growing at epidemic proportions worldwide, is caused by a combination of genetic and lifestyle factors. One of the most common pathologies associated with obesity is hepatic steatosis, an accumulation of fat within the liver that can progress to liver fibrosis, cirrhosis, and ultimately lead to hepatocellular carcinoma. There is emerging evidence that alternative mRNA splicing, the key mechanism providing transcript and protein diversity, is dysregul...

Dietary fat influences systemic inflammatory status, which, in turn, determines the progression of age-associated diseases. Peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) comprise a subset of white blood cells placed at the crossroad between diet and inflammation, in that they play a key role in the immune/inflammatory system and their gene expression pattern is influenced by diet. Since the somatostatin (SST), cortistatin (CORT) and ghrelin systems have been shown to modulate the...

Introduction: Non-functioningpituitary adenomas (NFPAs) are of benign nature but a sizeable number of NFPAs show aggressive features. Surgery is not always effective in treating NFPAs and thus other therapeutic options are needed. Previous studies have reported that NFPAs express somastostatin receptors (SSTRs) and dopamine receptors (DRDs).Aim: To systematically analyze the expression of SSTRs and DRDs in a large cohort of clinically well-characterized ...

omatostatin, originally isolated from ovine hypothalami in 1973, and cortistatin, identified a decade ago in amphibians and then in human and rodents, are two highly related peptides thought to derive from a common ancestor gene. Owing to their high structural homology, both peptides bind with similar affinity to the five so-called somatostatin receptors (sst1-sst5), and exert virtually undistinguishable effects on several physiological targets, including inhibition of endocri...

Prostate cancer (PCa) is the most common tumor pathology in men worldwide. The medical treatments currently used as first-line therapy after surgery are anti-androgens like abiraterone or enzalutamide, which, unfortunately, fail to stop the disease in a high percentage of cases, resulting in progression towards aggressive castration-resistant PCa. Therefore, new therapeutic tools to manage PCa are urgently needed. Biguanides and statins, two types of drugs commonly used in met...

Aim: To assess whether E-cadherin expression levels in somatotropinomas were associated with the response to somatostatin analogues (SSAs) therapy in patients with acromegaly.Methods: In this retrospective study, 56 acromegaly patients that underwent transsphenoidal surgery were evaluated. All patients were treated preoperatively with SSAs (octreotide or lanreotide) for at least 6 months. Responsiveness to SSAs was evaluated by percent IGF-1 reduction af...

Pituitary adenomas (PA), as well as pheochromocytomas and paragangliomas, are neuroendocrine tumors that arise from cells derived from the pituitary, adrenal and extra-adrenal nervous system, respectively. Recent studies have identified a growing series of susceptibility genes for these pathologies. Some genes may be associated with the development of both types of pathologies, as it is the case for succinate dehydrogenase complex genes, while, PAs have not been reported to da...

The somatostatin receptor 5 (sst5) and its truncated splicing variants (sst5TMD5, sst5TMD4) are considered putative biomarkers that can predict pharmacological response or aggressiveness in several endocrine-related pathologies, such as acromegaly. sst5 is encoded by a gene, SSTR5, that lacks introns within its coding sequence, and hence, the splicing variants identified are generated by non-canonical splicing events. However, the mechanisms underlying their genesis a...

Pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (panNETs) are the second most common neoplasm of the pancreas. panNETs arise from cells of the pancreatic islets and comprise a diverse and heterogeneous group of neoplasms. This hampers their systematic study, and the identification of common molecular signatures that might facilitate a better diagnosis of the disease, and the development of efficient therapeutic approaches. Indeed, there are no clinical, biochemical, anatomopathological, immu...

Prostate cancer (PCa) is a complex and heterogeneous cancer that progresses from slow-growing, tissue-confined lesions, to highly aggressive and metastatic forms. Among the different processes involved in this progression, dysregulation of the alternative splicing mechanism, and, particularly, the generation of the spliced androgen receptor variant-7 (ARv7), plays a critical role in the pharmacological resistance of PCa patients (i.e. Abiraterone or Enzalutamide). In this cont...