Endocrine Abstracts

Background: Gamma-Knife Stereotactic Radiosurgery (STRS) is a single highly focused dose of radiotherapy used for intracranial pathologies, including pituitary tumours. At the National Centre for Stereotactic Radiosurgery in Sheffield more than 450 patients undergo STRS per year. The UK experience of this modality of treatment for acromegaly is limited because of the few gamma knife units in operation.Objective: To assess the effectiveness and safety of ...

Background: Dopamine agonists (DA) are used as the first-line trearment in patients with macroprolactinomas. Late resistant to DA(cabergoline) therapy may occur. Patient with resistant macroprolactinoma may end up receiving a relative high dose of DA. These patients should be advised to take up radiotherapy option as earlier as possible to avoid the need of high dose dopamine agonist. We present a 63-year-old man who presented in 1999 with visual loss,due to giant macroprolact...

Primary hyperaldosteronism ('Conn's syndrome') may have a prevalence as high as 10% in hypertensive patients, and in some cases there may not be obvious hypokalaemia. Recently the use of a single aldosterone/ renin ('A/R') ratio has been advocated as a screening test for Conn's, and less influence by anti-hypertensive drug therapy has been claimed.We have established a cut-off for ambulant A/R ratios of 25 ng/mU using the DPC'Coat-a-Count' aldosterone method and the Nichols 'A...

Background: Women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) are commonly associated with insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome and a family history of diabetes mellitus (DM). They are therefore at risk of diabetes and dyslipidaemia. Diabetes UK (2006) recommends screening for diabetes in PCOS patients who have a body mass index (BMI) ≥30. The recommended test is fasting plasma glucose (FPG). We therefore investigated 55 PCOS patients and 33 healthy volunteers to test the hy...

Aims: Endogenous and exogenous oestrogens have previously been shown to improve postprandial lipid metabolism, probably due to up-regulation of hepatic LDL receptors. We used stable isotope techniques to investigate the contribution of muscle oxidation of dietary lipid to this improvement.Methods: Matched groups of healthy premenopausal (n=8) and postmenopausal (n=8) women and postmenopausal women taking oestrogen replacement therapy (HRT;...