Endocrine Abstracts

Aim: It is common practice to administer peptide receptor radionuclide therapy (PRRT) at fixed injected activity (IA) per cycle. This results in highly variable radiation doses to critical organs and undertreatment of most patients. We conceived a personalized PRRT (P-PRRT) system enabling delivery of a prescribed dose to the kidney over four cycles. Our goal was to assess the potential of P-PRRT to safely increase radiation dose rate to tumors, by performing a simulation in a...

Introduction: Kallmann syndrome (KS) is a genetic condition characterized by the association of anosmia or hyposmia and GnRH deficiency resulting in congenital hypogonadotropic hypogonadism (CHH). Different genes can be implicated in KS, and the most frequent allelic variant occurs in the KAL1/ANOS1 gene in the X-linked form. Differential diagnosis is often made with other rare genetic diseases as CHARGE syndrome (CS) that includes hypogonadism, hyposmia and several organ defe...

Neuroendocrine tumours (NETs) can be sporadic or can arise in complex hereditary endocrine disorders such as multiple endocrine neoplasias (MENs), familial paragangliomatosis (FPGLs), neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1), von Hippel–Lindau disease (VHL), tuberous sclerosis (TSC). It has been estimated that hereditary NET occurrence varies with site of origin of the tumour, representing 5–30% of all cases of NET. These rates seems to be an underestimation and novel mutation...

Introduction: Targeted therapy with the multi-kinase inhibitor sorafenib is effective for treatment of differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC) unresponsive to RAI. Although kinase-inhibitors (KIs) are usually well tolerated, severe and even fatal adverse events are reported. Aim of the study was to assess incidence and characteristics of fatal events in patients with RAI-refractory DTC responsive to treatment with sorafenib.Design: A retrospective analysis o...

Introduction: Paragangliomas are neuroectodermal tumors that arise from adrenal medulla or extra-adrenal ganglia and are characterized by high vascularisation. A high rate of these tumours is genetically inherited. For malignant paragangliomas, chemo- and radio-therapy are potentially effective, but tumor response is of short duration and patient prognosis is quite poor. Sunitinib is a tyrosine-kinase inhibitor, targeting VEGFR1, -2, PDGFRα, -β, RET and c-Kit. Recent...

Introduction: Kinase-inhibitors (KIs) are effective for treatment of most aggressive endocrine cancers. The crucial point about treatment with KIs is that these agents are not curative and their effects are at best transitory and are always followed by a restoration of tumour growth and progression. Several retrospective and phase II studies demonstrated efficacy of both sorafenib and sunitib for treatment of iodine refractory differentiated thyroid cancer although results fro...

Introduction: Medullary thyroid cancer (MTC) is a well-differentiated neuroendocrine tumor in which somatostatin receptor (sst) expression is higher for sst1 and sst5 than for sst2. This may explain why the available sst2–selective analogues do not work in these patients and why pasireotide (SOM230), a novel, multi-receptor targeted somatostatin analogue with high-binding affinity for sst1,2,3 and sst5 coul...

Context: Primary hyperparathyroidism (PHPT) is a common endocrine disease, characterized by the chronic elevation of serum calcium (Ca) levels induced by a long-standing increase of PTH concentrations. PHPT includes mild-asymptomatic and symptomatic forms. Cinacalcet is effective in lowering serum Ca levels in PHPT, but is indicated solely in mild-asymptomatic PHPT meeting surgery criteria. Management of non-surgical mild-asymptomatic PHPT is still a debated issue.<p class...