Endocrine Abstracts

Active acromegaly is associated with significant comorbidity and reduced quality of life. Cross-sectional studies have shown that quality of life did not significantly change in long-term cured acromegalic patients. However, the effect of medical treatment on the quality of life in the short term is unknown.We evaluated the quality of life by a disease-specific questionnaire in a longitudinal study before and after a 6-month course with somatostatin anal...

Housekeeping genes (HK) are commonly used as controls for the normalization of the RNA amount in quantitative RT-PCR experiments. The question whether their expression is influenced by the metabolic state of the patient and/or the tumour transformation is still unresolved and until now, HK genes have been used in quantitative studies without considering that their expression could be different in tumor with respect to normal tissue. Aim of this study was to identify HK genes e...

Prolactin-secreting (PRL) adenomas are about 40% of all pituitary adenomas. The most important clinical symptoms of PRL excess are gonadal and sexual dysfunction as a result of tumor expansion in patients with macroadenomas. Medical therapy of prolactinomas relies on the use of dopamine agonists which induce normalization of PRL levels and shrinkage of the tumor mass in the majority of patients. The present study evaluated whether doses of dopamine agonist inducing normalizati...

The reported prevalence of RET somatic mutations in sporadic MTC is about 40–50% and the most frequent somatic mutation is Met918Thr in exon 16. MTC harboring a somatic RET mutation have been demonstrated to have a more advanced stage at diagnosis and a worse outcome. Although RET mutations are believed to be driving events in the MTC tumorigenesis only the finding of somatic mutations in microMTC can confirm this hypothesis.Aim of the present work ...

Thyroid hormone resistance (THR) and pituitary TSH-secreting adenomas (TSHoma) are both characterised by increased serum free thyroid hormone levels and normal TSH concentrations. Differentiation of the two syndromes is a clinical challenge, and relies on the suppression (TRH) or lack of suppression (TSHoma) of TSH-dependent parameters and on the presence of germinal mutations in the thyroid hormone receptor beta 1 gene in patients with THR. Thyroid blood flow, evaluated using...