Endocrine Abstracts

Background: The mechanism underlying the spontaneous improvement of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) during pregnancy and the subsequent post-partum flare is incompletely understood. The glucocorticoid receptor (GR) polymorphisms Bcl1 and 9β are associated with an increased and decreased glucocorticoid sensitivity respectively. We examined the relation between carriership of these functional GR polymorphisms and disease course during pregnancy and post-partum in RA...

Introduction: Elevated levels of cortisol are known to induce a wide range of pathology, e.g. abdominal obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Measuring serum and saliva cortisol is limited to one time point. Measurement of cortisol in scalp hair is a recently developed method to measure long term cortisol levels and might reflect cortisol exposure in patients with hyper- or hypo-cortisolism and in healthy persons. Our aims were to explore this measurement of cor...