Endocrine Abstracts

Women with Turner Syndrome (TS) often feel well but require detailed screening for potential sequelae, which may impact on their quality of life, morbidity and mortality. They may also have psychological issues around living with the condition. It is our opinion that women with TS benefit from attending a specialised clinic and consequently an Adult TS Clinic (ATSC) was set up, however the opinion of the women attending such a service is not known. A survey was therefore condu...

Bariatric surgery has had to change its name because as a ‘weight loss treatment’ it was far less successful than as a ‘health gain treatment’. The focus now is on metabolic surgery and no longer on just reducing kilograms but rather on improving organ function. The organs that appear to benefit most are those damaged by the combination of type 2 diabetes and excess adipocytes. At the heart of success of surgery is the significant gut adaptation which then ...

Changes in hormone output to regulate physiological processes is a feature of all endocrine systems, with the added complication that for many systems, the pattern as well as level of output, determines the response of target tissues. Periodic patterns of hormone secretion can occur over multiple time scales, from ultradian to circadian, infradian, and circannual and may be dependent on physiological status. The activity and output of lactotroph and somatotroph cells of the pi...

Appetite can be better defined as hunger and fullness. Both of these change significantly after bariatric surgery. Gut hormones such as Peptide YY (PYY) and Glucagon like peptide-1 (GLP-1) are gastrointestinal peptides implicated in appetite control and glycaemic homeostasis. In non-obese individuals these satiety gut hormones may be attenuated. Given that PYY and GLP-1 are secreted from enteroendocrine L cells in the intestine, it is not surprising that manipulation of the ga...

Objective: To evaluate the effect of a new care organisation on multiple outcomes of transition success and its cost-effectiveness in patients with any endocrine or metabolic disease diagnosed during childhood and transferred to adult care.Design: Non-randomized controlled trial in a French University Hospital.Methods: Patients transferred to adult care during the control period (04/2014-08/2016) and the intervention period (09/201...

Pituitary hormones are released into the bloodstream in a pulsatile fashion in response to stimuli from their hypothalamic regulators. For efficient generation of hormone pulses, both the hypothalamic mechanisms and the pituitary target cells must exhibit a high degree of coordinated secretory activity. This is particularly important for the growth hormone (GH) axis since the target tissue responses are critically dependent on the temporal pattern of GH exposure, as well as th...

The classical paradigm of lactotroph prolactin production and release is based around tonic inhibition by hypothalamic dopamine and stimulation by factors such as estrogen. We have recently shown that conditional ablation of pituitary androgen receptor (Foxg1-Cre ARKO) surprisingly does not change the concentration of circulating gonadotrophins but increases circulating prolactin in male mice; highlighting androgen signalling as a novel negative regulator of prolactin producti...

Background: Food intake and body weight are in a constant sense of balance, which is tightly regulated. The central control of appetite by the hypothalamus and areas in the brainstem has been established. The peripheral regulation of appetite via gut hormones has also been alluded to – previous studies have shown PYY and ghrelin hormones to be altered in obesity. Glucagon-like peptide-1 is a gut hormone released from L-cells in the distal ileum and colon. It has been impl...

The proglucagon-derived hormone, glucagon-like peptide–1 (GLP-1), augments both beta cell function and mass. However, GLP-1 is rapidly degraded in plasma, thereby limiting its potential as a treatment for diabetes. One approach to circumvent this problem would be to stimulate synthesis of GLP-1 locally in the islet.Emerging evidence suggests that pancreatic alpha cells, which normally produce glucagon, can adapt to produce GLP-1. This phenomenon may...

Transthyretin (TTR) distributes thyroxine in the cerebrospinal fluid of mammals. Choroid plexus epithelial cells produce and secrete TTR, and were long recognized as the only CNS source of TTR. However, research over the last years has reported neuronal-specific expression as well, but without a clear function. Recently, we found Ttr transcripts in cells of the adult mouse subventricular zone (SVZ), the largest neural stem cell (NSC) region, but the protein was undetectable. W...