Endocrine Abstracts

Background: Although surgery is considered the first-line treatment for patients with endogenous Cushing’s syndrome (CS), medical therapy is often required to control severe hypercortisolism. Metyrapone and osilodrostat are inhibitors of 11β-hydroxylase that have not been directly compared yet.Methods: Retrospective analysis of patients with adrenocorticotropin (ACTH)-dependent and ACTH-independent CS treated with metyrapone or osilodrostat (as...

BackgroundAgouti related peptide (AgRP) is a neuropeptide, produced by the hypothalamus and by the adrenal glands. AgRP is an antagonist of proopiomelanocortin (POMC) and its principal role is to stimulate appetite. Although current evidences suggest that AgRP levels are influenced by glucocorticoids, it is still not clear, whether they depend on adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) or cortisol. One of the aims of this study was to address this issue. Furt...

Background: Mitotane is regularly used in patients with adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) adjuvantly, in patients with high risk of recurrence, and in advanced disease. Multiple effects of mitotane result in adrenal insufficiency in virtually all patients. However, it is unclear how frequently the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis is recovering after treatment discontinuation. Here, we aim to investigate the HPA axis after treatment with mitotane.Me...

Introduction: Adrenocortical tumors consist in frequent benign adenomas (ACA) and rare highly malignant carcinomas (ACC). BIRC7/livin gene, a member of the inhibitors of apoptosis family, plays an important role in tumorigenesis in a variety of malignancies. Different studies demonstrated that BIRC7 overexpression represent a risk factor for cancer development and progression. The aim of our study was to evaluate the expression of BIRC7 in normal adrenals and adrenocortical tu...

Introduction: Sporadic neuroendocrine neoplasms (NEN) occur rarely in young-adult (YA) patients, with an estimated incidence is about 2.8 cases per million, and data specific to their epidemiology are limited. The aim of our study was to better characterize the natural history, prognosis and management of NEN in YA patients (≤ 35 years old) compared to adult-elderly (AE; >35 years old).Methods: A retrospective observational study including 204 ...

Introduction: Adrenocortical tumors (ACTs) are usually divided in adenoma (ACA) or carcinoma (ACC) according to histopathologic methods. Some lesions are occasionally difficult to classify according to these criteria. We studied the use of some immunohistochemical markers to recognise the difference between malignant and benign tumors.Materials and methods: We studied 12 patients affected by ACC and 10 by ACA. Clinical evaluation and hormone analysis wer...

Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is a rare and aggressive endocrine malignancy that produces glucocorticoids in 60% of cases causing clinically relevant hypercortisolism. Since, we observed in another study, that shaping these immunosuppressive and life-threatining properties with corticosteroid inhibitors not only led to a glucocorticoid receptor-related downregulation of ROR1 but also to the upregulation of another promising membrane bound oncogenic antigen* (AG), we sought to...

Background: Serum liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry (LC–MS/MS) steroid profiling is used for the diagnosis of adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC). Guidelines recommend endocrine work-up in addition to radiological imaging for follow-up in ACC, but data on this topic are scarce.Aim: To retrospectively investigate an earlier detection of a recurrent or progressive disease by using endocrine follow-up with LC–MS/MS measurements in com...

Background: Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is a rare endocrine cancer. We aimed to develop machine learning (ML) models for predicting clinical outcomes of patients with ACC and deploy them as a web-based decision support tool. Methods: The S-GRAS dataset1 was used as a training cohort (n=942), while the COMBI dataset2 and new patients were used as a validation cohort (n=220). We used S-GRAS parameters previously d...

Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is a very severe endocrine malignancy with poor prognosis. While cancer immunotherapies have revolutionized the treatment of several cancer entities, the results of initial studies of different immune checkpoint inhibitors in ACC were heterogeneous and clinically substantial responses were observed only in a subset of patients. Expression of immune checkpoint molecules - programmed cell death 1 (PD-1) and its ligand PD-L1 - has been shown to pred...