Endocrine Abstracts

Critical illness represents a major challenge for the human body where an adequate stress response is indispensable for survival. Concomitantly high cortisol levels are observed and for a long time, an increased activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) was assumed to explain this hypercortisolism. Furthermore, insufficient activation of the HPA-axis during critical illness was described and referred to as ‘relative adrenal insufficiency’ or ‘c...