Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Pancreatic islet transplantation is an attractive approach to re-establish glycemic homeostasis in patients with brittle type 1 diabetes. However, islet damage along the isolation procedure limits the availability of viable islets for transplantation. The donor’s brain death (BD) is among the factors contributing for islet quality loss in this scenario. Exenatide, a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP1) analog, exerts anti-inflammatory effects leading to an increas...

Introduction: Polymorphisms in genes that encode proteins of the innate immune system, such as the toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), could affect the immune response as well as the prevalence of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Activated TLR4 induces expression of a spectrum of proinflammatory cytokines, which have been implicated in insulin resistance. Some studies have reported associations of the TLR4 Asp299Gly and Thr399Ile polymorphisms with T2DM. However, ot...

Introduction: Long-term insulin independence after pancreatic islet transplantation depends on the engraftment of a large number of viable islets. However, the yield and quality of islets isolated from brain-death (BD) donors are negatively affected by upregulation of proinflammatory cytokines and by hypoxia and oxidative stress that occurs during the BD status. Uncoupling proteins (UCPs) are mitochondrial transporters present in the inner mitochondrial membrane and are associ...

Uncoupling protein 2 (UCP2) is a mitochondrial protein located in the mitochondrial inner membrane, and it uncouples substrate oxidation from ATP synthesis, thereby dissipating the membrane potential energy and consequently decreasing reactive oxygen species (ROS) formation by mitochondrial respiratory chain. ROS overproduction is related to diabetic retinopathy (DR), a chronic complication of diabetes mellitus (DM). Recently, our group reported that the -866A/55Val/Ins haplot...