Endocrine Abstracts

Background and objective: Childhood obesity is associated with reduced insulin sensitivity and increased risk for type 2 diabetes (T2D). The objective of the MOCA trial was to investigate the effect of metformin in severely obese children and adolescents.Design and Methods: In a six month multi-centre randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trial metformin (1.5 g daily) or placebo was given to children and adolescents (8–18 years) with insulin r...

Habitual post-prandial absorption of saturated fatty acids (SFAs) increases systemic atherogenic lipoproteins and a pro-inflammatory response, a condition exacerbated by obesity, insulin resistance (IR) and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Also, gut derived bacteria (endotoxin) is absorbed coupled to damaging lipoproteins as it crosses the mucosa, which could directly impact on adipose tissue, as our previous studies suggest. The current studies addressed whether a SFA rich me...

Background: Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) is associated with insulin resistance, hyperandrogenism and dyslipidaemia but the effects of these disturbances on long-term health are not known.Aims: To determine the relative risk of diabetes, cancer, large vessel disease (LVD) and death for young women diagnosed with PCOS.Design: Data were extracted from The General Practice Research Database (GPRD), a longitudinal, anonymised resear...

A defining trait of modern civilization is easy access to food combined with minimum energy expenditure. This unbalance is responsible for the emergence of considerable wide-spread obesity and its harrowing cortege of life-threatening complications such as type-2 diabetes. Rare genetic disorders that manifest with obesity are of great value in discovering new pieces of the jigsaw on the origins of obesity as they allow us to link a phenotype with a specific protein or group of...

Background: A diagnosis of Addison’s disease means lifelong dependence on daily glucocorticoid and mineralocorticoid therapy and is associated with increased morbidity and mortality, as well as a risk of unexpected adrenal crisis. We wished to explore whether immunomodulatory therapy at an early stage of autoimmune Addison’s disease could lead to preservation or improvement in adrenal steroidogenic function.Design: We conducted an open-label, p...

Autoimmune Addison’s disease (AAD) is a rare, highly heritable endocrinopathy with an estimated λsibling (ratio of risk to a sibling vs the unrelated background population) of 160–210. The majority of the genetic risk to AAD has yet to be accounted for. We have used a tag-SNP approach to seek association between single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the GATA3 gene and autoimmune Addison’s disease (AAD). 2001 AAD cases and 1898 controls were included in ...

Introduction: The association between fatigue, functional status and subclinical hypothyroidism (SCH) remains unclear. The available data is not consistent, and this is likely to be due to selection bias in studies recruiting patients from clinic rather than unselected community populations. Only population surveys looking at prevalence of fatigue and functional status in SCH are likely to provide the answer.Objective and Methodology: We compared the pre...

Nodular thyroid disease is common and its pathogenesis remains poorly understood. Previously, we showed that thyroid-targeted overexpression of the proto-oncogene PTTG-Binding Factor (PBF) induced striking thyroid gland enlargement in transgenic mice (PBF-Tg)1. We have now investigated whether dietary factors influence goitrogenesis and the development of hyperplastic lesions in PBF-Tg mice. The mean weight of thyroids (5.8±0.9 mg; n=70) from 7 week old ...