Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Resistance to thyroid hormone alpha (RTHα) is characterised by tissue-specific hypothyroidism associated with barely normal thyroid function tests. Clinical features include dysmorphic facies, skeletal dysplasia, growth retardation, constipation, dyspraxia and intellectual deficit. Hormonal assessment often shows decreased/low-normal free thyroxine (fT4) and increased/high-normal free triiodothyronine (fT3) concentrations, resulting in a low fT4/fT3 ratio, w...

Congenital hypothyroidism (CH), occurs with a frequency of one in 3–4000 and is most commonly due (85%) to complete or partial failure of thyroid gland development (dysgenesis). Several transcription factors (TTF-1/Nkx2.1, TTF-2/FOXE1, PAX-8), are highly expressed in the developing rodent thyroid. We first showed that the FKHL15 gene is the human homologue of TTF-2, identifying a homozygous, loss-of-function, mutation in two siblings with CH, thyroid agenesis, clef...