Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Many causes of malabsorbtion of levothyroxine (LT4) in patients with hypothyroidism have been thoroughly described in literature. Pseudomalabsorption, poor compliance of the patient is most common cause of failure of LT4 and/or liothyronine (LT3) treatment.Case report: 27 years old woman, normopondeal, presented from the age of 11 years for short stature. Further investigations found pluritrope pituitary insufficiency ...

Obesity and its consequences, such as type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer, are serious health threats. However, despite what the obesity epidemic might suggest, the balance between caloric intake and expenditure is regulated with tremendous precision under most circumstances. Thus, a regulatory system exists, where deviations from the defended body adiposity level trigger signals that can be monitored by specific intracellular metabolic pathways. Such pathways a...

Introduction: Bone loss in thyroid dysfunction was first described by von Recklinghausen. Elevated bone turnover and decreased bone mass result when thyroid hormone levels are high and TSH levels suppressed. The changes in bone mass are impressive even in patients whit subclinical hypertiroidism, where thyroid hormones are within the normal range, but TSH is low or undetectable. Evidence show that endogenous and exogenous TSH suppression is associated with an increased fractur...

Maternal obesity during pregnancy is associated with several metabolic impairments in offspring, some of them evidenced from early infancy. Some reports have demonstrated that offspring of obese rats, whose obesity was induced by high fat diet consumption, have an increase sympathetic tone and increased norepinephrine (NE) content in kidney, liver and ovary. We recently reported that maternal administration of metformin prevents the increase in ovarian NE in offspring when the...

Context: Patients with adrenal insufficiency (AI) have excess mortality and morbidity, mainly due to cardiovascular diseases. The mechanisms for this is unclear.Objective: To assess cardiovascular structure and function in AI patients on conventional replacement therapy and after switching to once-daily, modified-release hydrocortisone (OD-HC).Methods: The analysis included 17 adult AI patients (11 with primary AI, 7 with secondary...

Paragangliomas (PG) originating from the nasal cavity are very rare and usually have an indolent growth. Surgery offers the only possibility of cure for these patients while radiotherapy can only slow their growth rate. Intracranial or leptomeningeal dissemination is very rare, with only 7 cases described in the literature. A 77 year old man with a 4-years history of nasal obstruction. He underwent a nasofibroscopy with a biopsy that revealed a nasosinusal neuroendocrine tumou...

Systemically administered glucocorticoids are known to cause hyperglycaemia, however there is a paucity of literature on the true prevalence, predictors or clinical impact of glucocorticoid-induced hyperglycaemia in hospital in-patients.This study examined glucocorticoid-induced hyperglycaemia in patients receiving >25 mg prednisolone; or >8 mg dexamethasone; or equivalent, for any indication over a 3 month period.64 consec...

Research Co-Culture is a podcast set up by industry-funded post docs from the University of Oxford who talk to researchers from various sectors (academic, pharma, start-ups, and more!) about the value of working together and how research can be better co-cultured....

Metabolic fluxes in the liver demonstrate circadian rhythms. The hepatic circadian clock is a cell- autonomous protein network that governs the switch between the fasted and fed states via a series of transcriptional-translational feedback loops (TTLs). Diet is a powerful zeitgeber which can reprogramme the liver clock to follow eating schedule rather than the geophysical day-night cycle. Diet- induced circadian disruption has been implicated in the pathogenesis of common meta...

Most cases of gynecomastia are idiopathic. Among the most frequently identified etiologies are: persistent pubertal gynecomastia, hypogonadism, anabolic steroids and other pharmaceutical drugs use. In the literature, ginecomastia is a well-recognized manifestation of thyrotoxicosis in male patients (in the range of 10% to 40%). However, it is extremely rare in clinical practice as the initial presentation of thyrotoxicosis. The two main factors that contribute to gynecomastia ...