Endocrine Abstracts

Many people are now obtaining health information from social media. Misinformation and conflicts of interest are rife on these platforms and can filter into the clinical setting, where patients increasingly attend with unrealistic expectations. The thyroid clinic is a prime example. Misconceptions can sometimes set the agenda and make consultations challenging. Here I will share my clinical experience about how to answer common difficult questions in the thyroid clinic and res...

Over the last two decades, the menopause management pendulum has swung wildly from very few women wanting HRT to so many women wanting it, with the recent increased awareness in the media, that shortages have occurred. Some narratives have resulted in greater fear about menopause and unrealistic expectations about HRT. Conflicting reports have led to much confusion among women. In this talk, I will discuss the implications of menopause today for women in context, including rel...

Over the last two decades, the menopause management pendulum has swung wildly. After the publication of the Women’s health initiative study in 2002, few women were prescribed HRT. With the recent increased awareness in the U.K. media, many women are requesting HRT, to the point that medication shortages have occurred. This overview will summarise the current national recommendations and how we arrived here. The talk will cover the implications of the increased menopause ...

Chronic fatigue presenting in the endocrine clinic is often intangible and difficult to assess. From the patients perspective fatigue is very disruptive to quality of life, exacerbates health related anxiety and can trigger functional symptoms. Patients with symptoms of chronic fatigue frequently have multiple contributory components to their symptoms, including endocrine, behavioural, and other medical factors. Investigation and management approaches will depend on whether th...

We report a 9-year-old Caucasian boy with type 1 diabetes mellitus and elevated blood glucose measurements, which did not correlate with apparent normal range HbA1c values. Safeguarding concerns due to raised blood glucose levels were raised at school, but were not pursued due to normal range HbA1c. Haemoglobinopathy screen showed hereditary persistence of foetal haemoglobin (HPFH) giving the falsely reassuring HbA1c levels. Subsequent fructosamine measurement confirmed the tr...

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...

Systematic collections of neuroimaging data are rare in brain tumour survivors treated with adult growth hormone replacement therapy (AGHRT). In 1993, our unit implemented a policy of performing baseline brain scans on every brain tumour survivor before starting AGHRT, with repeat neuroimaging at least once after 12 to 18 months treatment. This retrospective study analyses the neuroimaging results for this cohort of 60 patients. Follow-up scans were available in 41 (91%) of th...

Male problems such as oligospermia, azoospermia among others, affect around 30% of infertile couples. Male fecundity relies on the production of large numbers of spermatozoa which is dependent on the number of Sertoli cells. Activin and related TGFβ family ligands regulate testicular development and function. Follistatin Like-3 (FSTL3) is a glycoprotein that binds and inhibits activin. FSTL3 deletion in mice leads to increased adult testicular size with concurrent increas...

Male problems such as oligospermia, azoospermia among others, affect around 30% of infertile couples. Male fecundity relies on the production of large numbers of spermatozoa which is dependent on the number of Sertoli cells. Activin and related TGFβ family ligands regulate testicular development and function. Follistatin Like-3 (FSTL3) is a glycoprotein that binds and inhibits activin. FSTL3 deletion in mice leads to increased adult testicular size with concurrent increas...

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