Endocrine Abstracts

Loss of muscle mass is associated with ageing and several degenerative pathological conditions which limit movement and critically impair quality of life. One key regulator of muscle mass is myostatin which inhibits muscle growth. In circulation, myostatin is bound to follistatin-like 3 (FSTL3) in an inactive complex. FSTL3 is a natural, soluble regulator of myostatin along with follistatin (FST) and myostatin propeptide. In the FSTL3 gene deleted mouse (FSTL3 KO), however, to...

Associations of Insulin-like growth factor-II with cardiovascular risk have been inadequately studied. We studied longitudinal associations of IGF-II with cardiovascular risk factors in people with type 2 diabetes. Subjects and methods: 462 type-2 diabetes patients aged 26 to 86 years from the Salford Diabetes cohort were analysed. Longitudinal clinical information was extracted (years 2002–2009) from an integrated database of primary care and hospital data. IGF-II was me...

Insulin-like growth factors have fundamental roles in metabolism and apoptosis. Circulating IGF-I and IGF-II are primarily sequestrated with IGFBP-3 in ternary complexes with the acid-labile subunit. We hypothesized that polymorphisms of the IGFBP3 gene may impact circulating IGF-II concentrations.Methods: 478 Caucasian patients were selected from the Salford Diabetes Cohort for analysis. Thirteen haplotype tagging single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) ...

Growth hormone (GH) is involved in body growth and metabolism. This hormone is used for the treatment of various clinical conditions and is administrated subcutaneously once daily or 3 times a week. The chronic use of GH has side effects; among them, the increase in tumor incidence. GH activates pathways related with oncogenesis not only by the activation of its specific receptor, but also by transactivation and regulation of the expression of the epidermal growth factor recep...

Introduction: Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) has shown to be associated with increased levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines. This study was undertaken to determine the changes of pro-inflammatory cytokines in patients with PCOS after rimonabant and/or metformin treatment.Methods: A 3 month randomised open labelled parallel study of rimonabant or metformin in 20 patients with PCOS with a body mass index >30 kg/m2 was undertaken. Subsequen...

Follistatin like 3 (FSTL-3) is an endogenous inhibitor that binds and inhibits TGFβ family ligands such as activin, myostatin and GDF11. Activin plays crucial roles in development, cellular proliferation and apoptosis while myostatin is a known blocker of muscle growth. To identify physiological roles of FSTL3, FSTL3 gene deletion mice (FSTL3 KO) were generated which displayed altered glucose and lipid metabolism phenotypes. To address the role of FSTL3 in cellular biolog...