Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction/Aim: In Addison’s disease, patient-self maintenance of adequate cortisol levels is essential. Optimising cortisol control is challenging and well documented. Traditional management aims to ensure adequate daily cortisol levels, management of stressful situations/acute illness, avoiding over replacement. Alert dogs are currently used to support patients with hypoglycaemia unawareness. Recent reported international studies of alert dogs in primary and secondary...

Patients with adrenal insufficiency (AI) should be informed about ‘sick day rules’ and risk of a life-threatening adrenal crisis if corticosteroids are abruptly stopped or if the steroid dose is inadequate.Aims and Methods: To assess current practice with regard to steroid advice given across medical specialties at Oxford University Hospital Trust. To assess patient knowledge both in a specialist Endocrine department and in a medical specialty ...

Introduction: The importance of good transition care has been highlighted by NICE and NHSI. Over the last 5 year we have focused on transforming our endocrine transition service.Background: Our centre took part in the BSPED/BES-led 2014 National Adolescent Care and Transition Audit of Young people with Hormone Conditions. From this we identified key areas for service improvement including: families wanted to establish a better relationship with and have ...

Background: To date, there is no consensus as to the gold-standard screening test for diagnosing Cushing’s Syndrome (CS).Objectives: This study aimed to: a) compare the ability of late-night salivary cortisol (LNSC) against overnight dexamethasone suppression test (ONDT) and urinary free cortisol (UFC) as screening test for pathological hypercortisolism (PH); b) test the performance of those tests in diagnosing Cushing’s disease (CD) or mild au...

The dexamethasone suppression test (DST) is a common screening test in Cushing’s syndrome but associated with false positive result in 10-20%. One cause of false positivity is inadequate dexamethasone absorption. An assay to measure serum dexamethasone concentration can be used to validate the accuracy of the DST result.Aims: To audit 1) Use of the dexamethasone assay in DSTs 2) How frequently dexamethasone levels are inadequate 3) ...