Endocrine Abstracts

I would like to present a case of malignant paraganglionoma which first presented as a mass in right clavicle in a 32-year-old female at Cork University Hospital. Her other medical background included Type 2 diabetes controlled on oral hypoglycemic agents and hypertension. On further imaging, she was found to have another mass in peri aortic region and biopsy confirmed the diagnosis and further verified by MIBG scan in March, 2005. Molecular analysis confirmed deletion of exon...

BackgroundStress responsiveness is mediated through sympathetic and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activation. The gold standard investigation is the plasma catecholamine and cortisol response to the insulin tolerance test (ITT). This is invasive, and the use of salivary surrogates for stress responses would be a great advance.ObjectiveDemonstrate whether salivary alpha-amylase is a potential surrogate m...

Exercise is a potent stimulus for growth hormone (GH) release and a single 30 s sprint elicits a marked increase in circulating GH. However, the mechanisms regulating GH release during and after exercise are not fully understood (1). The aim of the present study was to determine whether age, body composition, the metabolic response to or performance during a single 30 s sprint are predictors of the GH response in young men.Following local Ethics Committe...

We report the use of Gamma knife radiosurgery (GK) to 15 somatotroph adenomas. Eight patients had refractory acromegaly despite maximal conventional treatments: all had undergone conventional radiotherapy (CRT), mean interval between CRT and GK 15.6 years. Six had undergone surgery, two on more than one occasion. Five were receiving somatostatin analog therapy, one was receiving dopamine agonist therapy, one was on pegvisomant alone. All had radiologically defined disease, wel...

Background: Organ infiltration and metastasis are the only parameters defining malignancy of pancreatic endocrine tumors. Several studies had demonstrated the prognostic value of Ki-67 expression measured on histological sections obtained from the removed pancreatic endocrine tumors. We postulate that Ki-67 expression measured on fine needle aspiration cytology provides pre-operative indications of the malignancy of pancreatic endocrine tumors.Aim: Aims ...

Pretibial myxedema (PM) is a rare extrathyroidal manifestation of Graves’ disease for which there is no specific treatment. When the clinical picture is markedly evident, topical treatment with steroid ointments is practised. There has been previous experience of subcutaneous injections with steroids by using standard needles, but this procedure caused nodular degeneration of the skin. Aim of the present study was to experiment a novel modality of treatment with the injec...

In assessing TAO, orbital CT scan allows measurement of extraocular muscle and optic nerve dimensions but it is useful mainly for a qualitative analysis and cannot be used in the clinical score of the disease. Aim of the present study was to seek a number which could express the expansion of the orbital tissue and be used in grading the severity of TAO. 39 TAO patients and 24 control subjects were studied. We have measured the orbital area (OA) on the central axial section of ...

We are conducting an open study on the treatment of Graves’ disease (GD) and thyroid-associated ophthalmopathy (TAO) with the monoclonal antibody to CD-20, rituximab (RTX) (MabThera, Hoffman-Roche, Basel). RTX induces depletion of B cells and GD is typically a B cell dependent autoimmune disease. We present preliminary results on 7 patients with GD and TAO at different clinical stages: 3 women with newly diagnosed GD and initial TAO; 1 woman with GD and moderate-severe TA...

Introduction: Patients with acromegaly have an increased risk of colorectal cancer and pre-malignant adenomatous polyps; however the frequency of colonoscopic screening remains unclear.Aims: To determine optimum frequency for repeated colonoscopy of acromegalic patients.Methods: Since 1992, 254 patients (mean age 56.6 years) at our centre have undergone at least one fibre-optic colonoscopic surveillance; 156, 60 and 15 patients hav...

Cushing’s disease (CD) is very rare in prepubertal children, and remains a challenge to diagnose and manage. We review the diagnostic features and therapeutic outcome of prepubertal (defined as testicular volume <4 ml (M) and breast stage <2 (F)) CD patients treated in a single centre. Fifteen prepubertal patients (median age 9.4 years; range 5.8–13.7) fulfilled standard diagnostic criteria for CD and there was male preponderance (12 M (80%), median age 9.1 y...