Endocrine Abstracts

The finding of an adrenal incidentaloma warrants a careful diagnostic work-up to assess hormonal activity and potential malignancy. Current diagnostic algorithms depend largely on imaging studies, which is time-consuming, expensive and carries a health risk. Urinary steroid profiling using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) might be a valuable diagnostic test for differentiating benign from malignant adrenal lesions, as adrenocortical carcinomas (ACC) often cause abn...

Case report: We present the case of a patient with somatotroph adenoma combined with neuronal choristoma Pituitary Adenoma Neuronal CHoristoma (PANCH). A female patient, 44 years of age, manifested with acromegaly type features since 1993, while mentioning also headaches, amenorrhea, and peripheral type visual disturbances since 1997. The clinical examination revealed an obese woman with typical acromegalic features. The laboratory evaluation before pituitary surgery showed a ...

Background: Thyroid disorders are prevalent in western society, yet many subjects experience limited symptoms at diagnosis, especially in hypothyroidism.Design: In order to compare the health-related quality of life (HR-QOL) of subjects with suppressed TSH-levels (TSH<0.5 mU/l) or elevated TSH-levels (TSH>10 mU/l) to subjects with normal TSH-levels (TSH 0.5–4 mU/l), a cross-sectional study was performed within the Dutch adult population who ...

Background: Pheochromocytomas (Pheo) and paragangliomas (PGL) are rare, mostly benign tumors. Most of these tumors are sporadic but a significant percentage can be found as components of hereditary tumor syndromes caused by germline mutations of the VHL, RET, NF1, SDHD, SDHC, SDHB and the recently identified SDHAF2 genes. Germline mutations of these genes can be also found in several cases with apparently sporadic Pheo/PGL.<...

Introduction: Positron emission tomography (PET) using 6-[F-18]fluoro-L-dihydroxyphenylalanine (18F-DOPA) has an excellent sensitivity to detect carcinoid tumor lesions. 18F-DOPA-tumor uptake and the levels of biochemical tumor markers are mediated by tumor endocrine metabolic activity. Therefore we evaluated whether total 18F-DOPA-tumor uptake on PET, defined as the whole-body metabolic burden (WBMTB) reflects tumor load per pat...