Endocrine Abstracts

Objective: In vitro data suggest that somatostatin receptors (SSTR) and mTOR pathways might represent reasonable targets for novel therapies, since are involved in growth of adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC). However, in vitro analysis of combination treatments, targeting both mTOR and SSTR as compared to mitotane, and detailed tissue typing mTOR/SSTR pathway are poorly explored in ACC.Methods: This study was designed to characterize the t...

Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is a rare tumour characterised by a high rate of recurrence following radical surgery. Surgery of recurrent ACC may increase survival; thus, it is mandatory a timely and accurate detection of recurrence, either to increase the chance of radical extirpation or to avoid unnecessary surgery. This study investigated the role of PET–CT in the diagnosis of recurrence of ACC during follow-up of disease-free patients and analyzed whether this tool m...

The existing follow-up studies on patients with incidentally discovered adrenal adenoma (AA) focused almost exclusively on repeat imaging and endocrine work-up on a short period.Of consecutive 152 patients with AA referred to our center from 1989 to 2003, we have assessed the risk of developing metabolic disorders and vascular complications in the 74 patients who did not underwent surgery (51 women and 23 men, median age 57, range 25–74 years) durin...

Recent guidelines recommend to use the 1-mg DST to screen for subclinical hypercortisolism assuming that a post-DST cortisol >5.0 μg/dl define this condition. However, several experts suggest a more sensitive cut-off at 1.8 μg/dl while others consider mandatory to confirm unsuppressibility with a 8-mg DST. A consecutive series of 64 patients (22 men, 42 women, aged 28–81 years) with clinically inapparent adrenal adenoma were studied between 2005 and 2007. Th...

The optimal treatment of recurrent adrenocortical cancer (ACC) remains to be established since there are discrepant opinions on the value of repeat surgery. We did a retrospective analysis of the outcome of patients who were referred to our units from 1988 to 2006 for a recurrence of ACC, which occurred 2–83 years after radical removal of the tumor. In that period, the treatment policy of ACC recurrence differed among our units, since oncologists were more accustomed to u...