Endocrine Abstracts

Background: PHPT is often overlooked/underdiagnosed. Several strategies (biochemical markers alone or combined in complex algorithms) have been investigated to easily diagnose/screen PHPT, but PHPT diagnosis remains challenging at present, especially in asymptomatic patients. As serum calcium (Ca) and phosphorous (P) are inversely related in PHPT, the Ca/P ratio could be a good candidate tool for PHPT diagnosis. Surprisingly, no literature data on Ca/P ratio are available, des...

Background: Primary hyperparathyroidism (PHPT) is the third most common endocrine disorder. The Ca/P ratio is an accurate tool to differentiate patients with PHPT (>3.5 if Ca and P are expressed in mg/dl) from healthy subjects [1]. The reliability of this index is based on the fact that serum Ca and P are inversely related together. However, other disorders of the Ca-P metabolism, such as hypophosphoremia (HypoP), might impair the Ca/P ratio.Aim: To ...

Background: The diagnosis of PHPT and chronic HypoPT is still challenging, mainly due to the wide spectrum of clinical and biochemical presentation and the lack of validated diagnostic index in literature. The serum Ca/P ratio has been proposed as an accurate tool to diagnose PHPT in a small sample of patients, while no data is available about its possible application for HypoPT.Aim: To validate the serum Ca/P ratio as a diagnostic index for PHPT and to ...

Introduction: Follicular thyroid carcinomas (FTC) are the second most common type of thyroid malignancy. Micro-RNAs (miRNAs) are a new class of small, noncoding RNAs whose expression is deregulated in many types of human cancers and may lend novel clues to FTC genesis. Pre-miR146a represents one of the most up-regulated miRNAs in papillary thyroid carcinomas (PTC) and a SNP (rs2910164), identified in pre-miR146a, contributes to genetic predisposition to PTC, but data on FTC ar...

Introduction: The mechanism underlying the development of follicular thyroid carcinoma (FTC), the second commonest thyroid tumor, is still unknown. An interesting hypothesis is that changes in the expression of multiple regulatory RNA (miR) genes may be a major mechanism in thyroid carcinogenesis. For example, several studies suggested that SNP rs2910164 in the pre-miR146a, a precursor of miR146a, might be correlated to papillary carcinoma. The aim of this study was the evalua...