Endocrine Abstracts

Appropriate treatment of acromegaly results in biochemical control or cure and reduces signs and symptoms, morbidity and excess mortality. Nonetheless, many of these patients still have considerable decreases in quality of life parameters and suffer from increased morbidity due to combinations of factors, including pituitary insufficiency despite optimal endocrine substitution, irreversible effects of previous GH/IGF-1 excess with complex multisystem morbidity, and the effects...

A statement attributed to Aristotle is: ‘You can easily avoid criticism by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.’ If you want to do research, apply for competitive grants and publish relevant scientific papers in competitive journals, criticism is a fact of life. There is also a positive twist to criticism: it is a major driving force to advance knowledge in science.Frequently, the first reaction of authors to critical comments of r...

Although the role of radioiodine (RaI) in recurrent or metastatic thyroid cancer is beyond dispute, the efficacy of this therapy is hampered by the decreased expression of the sodium iodide symporter (NIS) in DTC during the process of dedifferentiation. At present, there are no effective therapies available for RaI non-avid DTC. Conventional chemotherapy is hardly effective in DTC, and no longer recommended in international guidelines. In DTC, many genetic alterations have bee...

Active resolution of inflammation is a previously unrecognized process essential for tissue homeostasis. Monocytes and macrophages may either promote or down-regulate inflammatory reactions depending on their state of activation. The effects of glucocorticoids (GCs), the most widely used immunosuppressive drugs, on monocytes are currently not well defined. By analyzing the GC-induced expression pattern in human monocytes by microarray technology and functional clustering we de...

Adipose tissue is central to the control of energy and glucose homeostasis. Modulation of corticosteroid action in adipose tissue represents a potent mechanism to alter this homeostasis. Corticosteroid hormone action in adipocytes has long been considered to be mediated by glucocorticoid receptors (GR). We and others have recently identified the mineralocorticoid receptor (MR) as a new target to modulate adipocyte function. The generation of homo- and heterodimers of the GR an...

It is a well-known observation that glucocorticoid hormones facilitate the storage of stressful, emotional events into memory. How glucocorticoids act in these cognitive processes has still not been completely clarified. Since almost a decade we have been collecting data indicating that memory formation of stressful events involves epigenetic mechanisms coordinating transcriptional processes in dentate gyrus granule neurons. We found that such events evoke the phosphorylation ...

Polycystic ovarian syndrome presents in 4–8% of women worldwide, making it the most common reproductive age endocrinopathy. Rheumatological concomitant diseases are extremely rare in PCOS patients, especially Raynaud’s phenomenon. Condition that, lowers the quality of life in patients, suggesting hormonal imbalances despite years of treatment. Studies show that oestrogen plays a role in the vasculature, it is exogenous administration increases the endothelium depende...

With the identification of mutations in the monocarboxylate transporter 8 (MCT8) gene in patients afflicted with the Allan–Herndon–Dudley syndrome (AHDS), the concept of transporter-mediated transmembrane transport of thyroid hormones was finally accepted. Impaired thyroid hormone transport into neurons and pituitary cells is believed to cause severe psychomotor retardation and altered thyroid hormone function tests. MCT8 is a specific thyroid hormone transporter abl...

The regular performance of exercise has beneficial effects on autonomic control, metabolism, immune and brain function. To increase our understanding of the beneficial effects of exercise on stress coping we investigated changes in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis and behaviour in mice and rats that had been voluntarily exercising since 4 weeks. If given a running wheel in their home cage, rodents such as mice and (Sprague Dawley) rats run spontaneously. Th...

Brown adipose tissue (BAT) is key in energy homeostasis. Catecholamines are critically involved in the regulation of BAT-thermogenesis, yet current research has focussed on noradrenaline and adrenaline. Some evidence suggests a role of dopamine (DA) in BAT-thermogenesis but the intracellular mechanisms have not been addressed. We applied our extensively characterised murine brown adipocyte cell line to address these questions.D1-like and D2-like receptor...