Endocrine Abstracts

Background: Vitamin D3 is the common supplemented form, vitamin D2 is often provided as prescribed supplement in many countries, such as the USA. In these countries, measuring 25(OH)D in patients treated with vitamin D2 using an assay that measures 25(OH)D2 poorly may confound clinical care. Recently, the ADVIA Centaur vitamin D assay has been commercialized for use in the clinical laboratory. We evaluated the assay’s ability of measuring both 25(OH)D2 and 25(OH)D3 and co...

Triorganotins, such as tributyltin (TBT), are environmental contaminants commonly found in antifouling paints that are used on the ships and other vessels. Unfortunately, these chemical are also suspected to cause endocrine-disrupting effects in mammals, due in part to their possible transfer through marine food chains and to the consumption of contaminated seafood. The importance of triorganotins as environmental endocrine disruptors in different animal models is well known; ...

Connexins are a proteins critically involved in the formation of gap junction, which connect cells with each other and enable the exchange of small compounds and, besides having a role independently of gap junction formation. At least, in the anterior pituitary two cellular networks have already been identified, one of them is composed of the endocrine inactive folliculo-stellate cells and the second one is the GH-producing somatotroph cell network. It is supposed that gap jun...