Endocrine Abstracts

Vitamin D is essential to the control of calcium homeostasis and is mainly provided by exposure to sunlight. In the UK circulating Vitamin D is subject to seasonal variation with peak values occurring in early Autumn and trough values in late Spring. Requests for Vitamin D assays are increasing but few laboratories quote seasonal reference ranges and many commercial suppliers quote reference ranges for populations living in warmer, sunnier climates. This study established seas...

A 64-year-old lady presented with weight gain, tiredness, palpitations and tremor. She had no goitre and no other extra thyroidal manifestations. Both TSH and thyroid peroxidase antibodies (>1300) were elevated and she was treated by her GP with Thyroxine 50 mcg daily. She felt a lot worse on this, so it was discontinued and a full thyroid hormone profile was checked (see Table 1) which prompted referral; to Endocrinology.Other pituitary hormone leve...

Pancreatic islet cell transplantation is proven to restore functional beta cell mass to achieve normoglycemia in diabetics, but is limited by low availability of human cadaveric donor tissue. A strategy to build capacity is to use stem cells (SCs), and induce their expansion and differentiation into functional islets in vitro. Islet cell neogenesis has been linked to transient and sequential expression of specific transcription factors (TFs) and the actions of endogenou...

The relationship of insulin resistance, androgens and endothelial dysfunction in polycystic ovary syndrome ,PCOS, is controversial till now. We evaluated if ICAM-1 levels differ between PCOS and healthy women and whether this marker of the early endothelial damage is associated with the particular metabolic and/or hormonal characteristics.After signing written informed consent, 39 PCOS women -median of age 25 yrs, BMI 24.9 and 10 age matched healthy wome...