Endocrine Abstracts

We report the use of Gamma knife radiosurgery (GK) to 15 somatotroph adenomas. Eight patients had refractory acromegaly despite maximal conventional treatments: all had undergone conventional radiotherapy (CRT), mean interval between CRT and GK 15.6 years. Six had undergone surgery, two on more than one occasion. Five were receiving somatostatin analog therapy, one was receiving dopamine agonist therapy, one was on pegvisomant alone. All had radiologically defined disease, wel...

Introduction: Patients with acromegaly have an increased risk of colorectal cancer and pre-malignant adenomatous polyps; however the frequency of colonoscopic screening remains unclear.Aims: To determine optimum frequency for repeated colonoscopy of acromegalic patients.Methods: Since 1992, 254 patients (mean age 56.6 years) at our centre have undergone at least one fibre-optic colonoscopic surveillance; 156, 60 and 15 patients hav...

Cushing’s disease (CD) is very rare in prepubertal children, and remains a challenge to diagnose and manage. We review the diagnostic features and therapeutic outcome of prepubertal (defined as testicular volume <4 ml (M) and breast stage <2 (F)) CD patients treated in a single centre. Fifteen prepubertal patients (median age 9.4 years; range 5.8–13.7) fulfilled standard diagnostic criteria for CD and there was male preponderance (12 M (80%), median age 9.1 y...

The preparation of Sandostatin LAR® injections using a 2 ml ampoule of vehicle solution may be associated with some technical difficulties of administration, with adverse consequences for patients. The development of a 2.5 ml prefilled syringe may alleviate some of these problems. We have compared these two methods of Sandostatin LAR® administration in 17 patients with acromegaly and 5 patients with neuro-endocrine tumours, (6 drug naïve, 1...