Endocrine Abstracts

Aims/hypothesis: Obesity and diabetes enhance the risk of developing cardiovascular diseases and heart failure. These metabolic disorders are generally reflected by natriuretic peptides system deficiency. Since brain natriuretic peptide (BNP) is known to influence metabolism and cardioprotection, we investigated the effect of chronic exogenous BNP treatment on adverse myocardial consequences related to obesity and diabetes.Methods: Ten-week-old C57BL/KsJ...

During maturation of oxytocin (OT) prohormone, several bioactive intermediate molecules are formed. The plasma concentrations of these forms (OT-G; OT-GK and OT-GKR) increase markedly in rat circulation at the end of gestation. At low concentration in the circulation OT stimulates while OT-GKR inhibits diuresis. Since OT and OT-GKR show different effects on the urine flow, we hypothesized that OT-GKR modulates renal action by targeting the V2 receptor.<p class="...

Oxytocin (OT) is involved in the regulation of energy metabolism and in the activation of cardio-protective mechanisms. We evaluated whether chronic treatment with OT could prevent the metabolic and cardiac abnormalities associated with diabetes and obesity using the db/db mice model. Four-week-old male db/db mice and their lean non-diabetic littermates (db/+) serving as controls were treated with OT (125 ng/kg per h) or saline vehicle for a period of 12 weeks. Compared to db/...