Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Fluorine-18 fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (18F-FDG PET) is an innovative method for the detection of primary tumours or metastases of thyroid cancer; however, recurrence or metastases of medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC) are still difficult to detect.Aim: The objective of this study was to evaluate the clinical use of 18F-FDG PET in patients with MTC.Patients and methods: We enr...

Introduction: Papillary thyroid micro-carcinoma (PTMC) is a well-differentiated thyroid cancer ≤10 mm in diameter. The recent higher prevalence of PTMC is due to the frequent detection of micro-carcinomas as an incidental finding in surgical specimens, but especially during routine imaging of the neck with highly sensitive techniques.Aim: To review the clinical course of PTMC so to reach its optimal management by adapting therapy and follow-up sche...

Octreoscan is currently the gold standard for diagnosis of somatostatin receptor positive NET but it is limited by a lower spatial resolution and physiological uptake noises. DOTATATE is a somatostatin analogue, radiolabelled with 68Ga and adapted for PET imaging.Aim of this study was to evaluate the diagnostic performance of 68Ga-DOTATATE PET compared to Octreoscan in NET.Fifty-one patients with NET (40 sporadic, 17 MEN1) of diffe...

Differentiated thyroid cancers (DTC) have an excellent prognosis with a 10 year disease-related survival of 85%. However, about 5% of DTC patients develop an aggressive disease with distant metastasis and loss of radioactive iodine (RAI) avidity. An effective treatment is not available for these patients and survival rates are less than 15%. The MAP-kinase pathway is strikingly involved in the pathogenesis of DTC. This is why compounds striking the MAP-Kinase pathway may be us...

Somatostatin analogues (SSA) represent a recognized therapeutic option in patients affected with functioning neuroendocrine tumors (NET). In non-functioning NET, SSA are reported to induce tumor stabilization in most of cases and objective response in <5%. NET associated to Multiple Endocrine Neoplasia type 1 (MEN1) are inherited tumors, generally located in the duodeno-pancreatic trait, characterized by well differentiated histotype, high expression of somatostatin recept...

Introduction: Percutaneous radiofrequency thermal ablation (RTA) is a new promising therapeutic approach to manage compressive thyroid nodules (TNs).Aim: To investigate effectiveness and safety of RTA in the treatment of compressive TNs in patients not receiving surgery or radioiodine.Study design: Forty patients (31–86 years) with compressive TNs were enrolled. Twenty-two patients had non-toxic TNs and 18 had toxic TNs and we...