Endocrine Abstracts

Many studies demonstrated that somatic BRAF gene mutation analysis increases diagnostic accuracy for papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC), even from very small samples. The gold standard for point mutations research is direct sequencing, that implies DNA extraction, PCR with specific primers, sequencing reaction and run on an automatic sequencer. This is an expensive and time consuming method, and the possible contamination with wild-type DNA not coming from the nodule significan...

GH and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1) are known to promote breast carcinogenesis. Even if breast cancer (BC) incidence in not increased in female acromegalic patients, mortality is greater as compared to general population. In order to evaluate whether GH/IGF1 excess might influence BC response to therapy, accounting for the increased mortality, we evaluated the effects of GH and IGF1 on cell proliferation of a BC cell line, the MCF7 cells, in the presence of doxorubicine...

Papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) represents the majority of differentiated thyroid cancers, presenting in 29–83% of cases the activating BRAF V600E mutation. The aim of our study was to analyse the influence of BRAF V600E mutation analysis on diagnostic accuracy of fine needle aspiration biopsies (FNAB) in clinically unsuspected thyroid nodules. We therefore enrolled 496 patients (383 females, 113 males; mean age 52 years), for a total of 671 samples. FNAB were evaluated by...