Endocrine Abstracts

Alterations in the thyroid axis have been reported following GH therapy both in adults and children with GH deficiency (GHD), even if the clinical significance of these changes, in small and short-term studies, remains uncertain. To evaluate the impact of GH replacement on thyroid status in a large selected cohort of prepubertal children with idiopathic GHD during a 3-years follow-up. Study outcome considered FT3, FT4 and TSH modifications (delta) during therapy and their corr...

Background: The Visceral Adiposity Index (VAI) has been suggested as a new gender-specific marker of visceral adipose dysfunction, strongly associated with insulin sensitivity in patients with cardio-metabolic risk.Aim: To test VAI in active acromegaly for the assessment of disease-associated metabolic risk evaluating its association with hormonal data, adipocytokine levels, insulin sensitivity and secretion parameters in a cohort of 27 subjects (15 M, 1...

Anaplastic thyropid carcinoma (ATC) is one of the most aggressive endocrine tumors with morphological features of undifferentiated neoplasm. Patients with ATC have a poor prognosis with a mean survival time of 2–6 months. Surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy do not improve survival rate. Bisphosphonates, analogs of endogenous pyrophosphates in which a carbon atom replaces the central oxygen atom, are successful agents for the prevention and treatment of postmenopausal o...

In the last years, a growing body of evidence supports the notion that tumors are organized in a hierarchy of heterogeneous cell populations with different biologic properties and that the capability to sustain tumor formation and growth exclusively resides in a small proportion of tumor cells, termed cancer stem cells (CSC). The existence of CSC was first proven in the context of acute myelogenous leukaemia, and subsequently verified in brain, breast, colon and prostate cance...

A strong evidence suggests the role of BRAFV600E mutation in determining the aggressiveness of thyroid cancer. To detect how the association of BRAF mutation could influence the aggressiveness of particular subtypes of thyroid tumors, we analysed a possible correlation between BRAFV600E and metalloproteinase (MMPs) activity, as its enhanced production could be an important determinant of tumor invasion. For this purpose, we investigated the activity and t...