Endocrine Abstracts

Background: Adipose tissue (AT) plays a central role in obesity-related complications such as cardiovascular diseases, insulin resistance, and type two diabetes. A comprehensive understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying adipocyte formation is of both fundamental and clinical relevance. It has been reported that UPR pathway, IRE1α-XBP1 regulates hepatic lipogenesis and the role of this pathway in adipogenesis in murine adipocytes has also been confirmed. Our tea...

The anti-diabetic drug, metformin, is associated with progressive decrease in serum vitamin B12 levels whereas vitamin B12 deficiency is related to increased insulin resistance and dyslipidaemia by altered methylation. As the risk of vitamin B12 deficiency is increased among metformin users, it is of utmost importance to examine how metformin response in vitamin B12 deficient population.We investigated the cellular mechanism of metformin in vitamin B12 i...

Lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A2 (LpPLA2) is a member of the phospholipaseA2 super family of enzymes, and is upregulated in arterial inflammation, obesity and cardiovascular disease. The other isoforms, iPLA2 and cPLA2, appear to contribute to inflammation through production of lipid mediators. The role of PLA2 in human adipose tissue (AT) is unclear, therefore we sought to i) characterise PLA2 isoforms in lean, obese, T2DM abdominal subcutaneous (AbdSc) and omental (Om...

Lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A2 (Lp-PLA2) is a member of the phospholipase A2 super family of enzymes that hydrolyse phospholipids, and is upregulated in arterial inflammation, obesity and cardiovascular disease. Secreted soluble Lp-PLA2 (sPLA2) increases arterial inflammation in addition to cytosolic calcium dependent PLA2 (cPLA2) and calcium independent PLA2 (iPLA2). These studies examined the influence of adipose tissue (AT) depots (abdominal subcutaneous (Abd Sc), ...

Background and aims: Bariatric surgery can lead to a quick reversal in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) status. However, despite this reversal inflammatory responses may still persist via activation of Toll-like receptors (TLR) within adipose tissue (AT); with triglycerides (TGs) noted as a potential mediator of such inflammation. Therefore the aims of these studies were to understand the impact of TG changes, pre- and post-bariatric surgery, on TLR expression in ex vivo</e...