Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Clinical Practice Guidelines1 advocate adrenal vein sampling (AVS) to distinguish between unilateral and bilateral primary aldosteronism (PA). Cannulating the right adrenal vein is difficult, and there is a lack of standardisation in sampling procedure and interpretation2. We audited our local service to identify improvements.Methods: All AVS procedures performed between January 2018-December 2020 (n = 31) wer...

Objective: Hypothyroidism is common and predominantly managed in primary care. Symptoms are non-specific, with thyroid function tests (TFT) required for diagnosis. We sought to investigate current practice in levothyroxine prescribing in primary care.Methods: We studied the initiation of levothyroxine using the General Practice Research Database (GPRD), the world’s largest database of anonymised medical records. Individuals with i) thyroid cancer ii...

Introduction: It is standard teaching that thyroid function is associated with mood, in particular hypothyroidism with depression. Recent studies however have provided conflicting data, with community based studies suggesting no relationship, but a study in patients on thyroxine showing an association. There may be biases involved in these studies as in communities with good health care, symptomatic people with mildly abnormal thyroid function are often put on thyroxine and ex...