Endocrine Abstracts

I propose to take you on a journey, which started in 2000, when I bought my first Hongshan jade carving, a reproductive piece, in Hong Kong. Since then, as my collection and my obsession have grown at very low financial cost, I have been trying to fathom out why so many ‘experts’ are completely wrong about jade, and especially Neolithic jade. This corner of collecting is truly in the dark ages, where expert opinion rules over evidence, and this is providing me with t...

Introduction: Propensity to centripetal adiposity is an ethnic characteristic amongst South Asians, which may underlie the excess risk for both coronary heart disease (CHD) and diabetes in this population. Circulating levels of adipocytokines (hormones which include leptin, adiponectin, tumour necrosis factor (TNF-alpha)) and C-reactive protein (CRP) reflect the adipose tissues endocrine and metabolic activity, and are implicated in CHD.Methods: We compa...

Objective. The aims of our study were to utilise a combination of high fidelity phenotyping, microarray gene expression profiling and conserved synteny mapping between rodent and human genomes to identify genetic determinants underlying human hypertension.Methods. We used the stroke-prone spontaneously hypertensive rat (SHRSP) and a congenic strain (SP.WKYGla2c*) produced by introgressing a quantitative trait locus responsible for blood pressure regulation on rat chromosom...

Introduction: Compared to ethnically European men, Pakistani origin men living in the UK have a lower circulating total and free testosterone level, corresponding with greater central adiposity and higher insulin resistance. Within a South Asian group we have now examined the effect of migration to the UK on male testosterone level.Methods: Circulating testosterone concentration was measured by automated immunoassay in 97 Gujarati males resident in India...

Endometriosis is a common gynaecological disease associated with severe pelvic pain and sub-fertility. We conducted a genome-wide association (GWA) study in 3,194 surgically confirmed endometriosis cases and 7060 controls of European ancestry from Australia and the UK using 540,000 genetic markers (SNPs). Polygenic predictive modelling showed significantly increased genetic loading among the 1364 (43%) cases with moderate-severe (rAFS III/IV) endometriosis. The strongest assoc...