Endocrine Abstracts

Thyroid hormone is a critical regulator of brain development, function, and metabolism. The hypothalamo-pituitary–thyroid (HPT) axis controls thyroid hormone secretion of the thyroid gland. In humans, this process generates predominantly thyroxine, a stable prohormone that cannot efficiently ligand nuclear thyroid hormone receptors prior to its activation to T3. Since the HPT axis is not capable for rapid and tissue-specific control of thyroid hormone levels, a...

Thyroid hormone (TH) signalling regulates tissues function in virtually all organs and exerts a striking impact on brain development and function. The major secretory product of the human thyroid gland is thyroxine (T4), a stable pro-hormone. In order to bind the TH receptor TR, T4 needs to get converted to T3 by deiodination. The hypothalamo-pituitary-thyroid (HPT) axis controls circulating TH levels, that show remarkable stability. However, tissue TH action undergoes vigorou...

Objective: Serum TSH and thyroid hormone (TH) levels are routinely used as main measures of thyroid function. While these are highly valuable markers, it is becoming more evident that under specific conditions, their predictive power for tissue TH status is limited due to the highly complex nature of tissue-specific TH signaling. This led to a high demand for human tissue TH action markers that could allow the characterization of tissue TH economy. Therefore, our goal was to d...