Endocrine Abstracts

Seventy percent of menopausal women experience vasomotor symptoms (hot flushes and/or night sweats), and 10% will describe them as intolerable, but many will have a contraindication and/or aversion to hormone replacement therapy which is the most effective treatment. Therefore, for those women current treatment options are limited and include herbal remedies, centrally acting modulators of neurotransmitter concentrations (eg SSRIs/SNRIs), clonidine, and cognitive behavioural t...

Seventy percent of menopausal women experience vasomotor symptoms (hot flushes/night sweats), which can be highly disruptive and persist for years; 10% describe them as intolerable. Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and other available treatments have variable efficacy and/or side effects. A novel therapeutic could therefore benefit 10 million in the UK alone, and particularly those who have a contraindication or aversion to HRT. Neurokinin B signalling is upregulated in menop...

Rather than be another careers session of pathway diagrams and tales from many years ago, this short talk will cover honest experiences of current training including tips and tricks with hindsight (relevant to any specialty training), and the highs and lows that happen along the way....

Background: Severe hyponatraemia and other electrolyte disturbances secondary to indapamide are documented in the literature. We report two cases that presented with neurological sequelae of profound hyponatraemia without seizures secondary to indapamide.Cases: An 86-year-old female presented with a history of confusion, vomiting and frontal headache associated with lethargy and anorexia. She had been started on indapamide 1 month earlier. She was on no ...

The definitive treatment for Cushing’s disease is curative surgery. Patients with severe disease burden will likely require pre-operative medical blockade to reduce the risk of peri- and post-operative complications. The threshold for deciding when to medically block excess cortisol is currently based on clinical judgment. Expert centres may use a different criteria to determine this. There is no widely adopted tool for evaluating the clinical severity of Cushing’s d...

Introduction: Gigantomastia is a rare condition characterised by excessive benign breast tissue growth that is thought to be a result of elevated physiological levels of circulating hormones (e.g. pregnancy), or an increased sensitivity of the breast tissue to such hormones. Isolated reports describe some medical conditions as precipitants (e.g. systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE)) or drugs (e.g. cyclosporine). Many will proceed to surgical intervention to improve physical and/...

Context: Better, reproducible and structured methods of assessing care provided to endocrine patients are needed. Similarly, access to regional units and referral pathways could be improved with nationally agreed standards for waiting times.Objective: To gain views on the current level of patient care and how services might be improved using a 360-degree assessment process.Method: Three web based surveys were created using SurveyMo...

Background: Tumour growth is critically dependent on blood perfusion, its source of oxygen and nutrients. Therefore, tumour vascularization has become an attractive target for the treatment of many cancers types. The study of endocrine-responsive tumours, in particular, needs improved platforms to screen drugs targeting vascularization that have better resolution and that do not compromise on inter-individual variability.Aim: Hence, we’ve set out to...

Hypoglycaemia in non-diabetic patients has a multitude of causes from exogenous insulin to paraneoplastic syndromes. We explore the importance of obtaining a ‘golden sample’, a serum blood sample, during the episode of hypoglycaemia, prior to reversal with treatment. The case herein describes a patient with recurrent episodes of unexplained hypoglycaemia which precipitated several hospital admissions. Standard screening tests did not detect any obvious cause for his ...

Objective: To conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of observational, cross sectional and longitudinal studies of sleep apnoea syndrome in acromegalic subjects to determine a) prevalence b) effect of treatment and c) relationship to GH and/or IGF-1.Method: A PubMed search using ‘(acromegaly) AND (sleep apnoea)’ as search terms was performed with subsequent hand searching of relevant papers. Cross sectional and longitudinal studies were ...