Endocrine Abstracts

Critical illness represents a major challenge for the human body where an adequate stress response is indispensable for survival. Concomitantly high cortisol levels are observed and for a long time, an increased activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) was assumed to explain this hypercortisolism. Furthermore, insufficient activation of the HPA-axis during critical illness was described and referred to as ‘relative adrenal insufficiency’ or ‘c...

It is obvious that adrenal cortex is plastic, with adrenal atrophy and functional hypoadrenalism during exogenous glucocorticoid therapy; yet adrenal hyperplasia and hyperfunction during stimulation from ACTH during Cushing’s disease. This is owing to subcapsular adrenocortical stem cells that regenerate the zones of adult adrenal cortex throughout life.We have performed a series of experimental medicine trials in order to explore the idea that auto...

In recent years, scalp hair analysis had been successfully introduced as a novel biomarker for long-term cortisol levels. Traditionally used methods to measure cortisol (blood, saliva, urine) are complicated by the circadian rhythm and pulsatile way of cortisol secretion, as well as the influence of acute stress and day-to-day variation. In contrast to these short-term measurements, hair cortisol analysis allows to quantify the average cortisol production for a prolonged perio...