Endocrine Abstracts

The human eye is an incredible organ. It can differentiate contrasts of light up to 1:10,000, equivalent to a photographic exposure value (EV) range of 14. The eye can also adapt to any lighting situation, stretching the total perceivable range to 1:1 million. For many applications, we rely on the camera for recording what our eyes can see. But is the camera able to reproduce the full range of light intensities present in natural scenes? The human eye has two types of photorec...

This story began shortly before my time. My involvement came about through wartime work for the Navy on survival at sea, and an eccentric professor. In 1942 Hetherington & Ranson in the USA found that lesions in the ventromedial nuclei of the hypothalamus in rats cause obesity. The suggestion that a hormone was involved came from my Ph.D. project, published in the Journal of Physiology as a Communication in 1957 and a full paper in 1959. In a number of rats in parabiotic p...

In adults severe GH deficiency has been a registered indication for the use of GH replacement since 1996. The UK prescribing policy has focused on a single biological endpoint, quality of life, whilst other European countries have adopted a holistic approach. How did this come about, why does the UK differ from its European neighbours, and is the UK practice satisfactory from an Endocrinologist's perspective ?Declaration of interest: There is no conflict...

The standard approach to in vitro fertilisation is ovarian hyperstimulation to provide multiple oocytes, which ultimately provides greater choice of embryos, but multiple pregnancy and the complication of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS) have been consequences. Single embryo transfer (SET) has been successfully used voluntarily in Scandinavia and regulatory restriction is becoming more effective in many countries. Having a smaller number of oocytes following milder sti...

Pro-inflammatory cytokines activate the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis but chronic inflammatory diseases such as Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) do not. The axis is subtly subnormal despite nocturnal cytokine peaks. This poses the question ‘Why does the endocrine dog not bark in the cytokine night?’. Is this chronic stress adaptation similar to that seen with restraint when the normotypic stressor is reduced with decreased parvocellular CRH mRNA, a compensatory ...

We are all prisoners of our faulted personalities, but only primary psychopaths use theirs systematically to target or imprison others. They lack the capacity to empathise, something normal people develop from early childhood. Considering people as objects, psychopaths survive by preying on what seems an incomprehensible weakness of normally empathic people. The condition of primary psychopathy is linked to lifelong dystunction of the amygdala, at the brain’s emotional co...