Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction and aims: Autophagy is an essential process for cell homeostasis that implies recycling and degradation of damaged organelles and long-lived proteins. It is induced during caloric restriction (in order to obtain energy) or other stress-inducing conditions. Autophagy is initiated by autophagosome formation, a double-membrane vesicle which engulfs cellular components and delivers them for degradation by fusing with lysosomes. Thus, proper autophagy regulation favour...

Background and aim: Obesity is a chronic disease associated with a positive energy balance leading to lipotoxicity, which contributes to the onset of obesity-associated metabolic disorders such as type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance. It’s well known that thermogenesis in brown adipose tissue (BAT) and “browning” of white AT (WAT) increase energy expenditure, thus promoting weight loss and protect against obesity. Recently, the microRNAs (miRNAs) that regulate...

Objectives: To study for the first time the differences in monocyte/macrophage infiltration, inflammation and adipogenesis in the subcutaneous and visceral adipose tissues of normal-weight subjects who differed in their degree of metabolic syndrome.Methods: The study included 92 normal-weight subjects who differed in their degree of metabolic syndrome. Anthropometric and biochemical parameters were measured. RNA from subcutaneous and visceral adipose tis...

Background and aim: Obesity (Ob) is tightly associated with metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes (DT2) andinsulin resistance (IR). Furthermore, obesity has been identified as one of the primary causes of mood disorders (MDs) including depression. Several studies have demonstrated the link between Ob, adiposity, neuroinflammation and MDs. The Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) and its regulator, the non-coding RNA BDNF antisense RNA (BDNFas), play an import...

Background and aimMajor depressive disorder (MDD) is one of the common mental disorder that affect more than 350 million subjects. MDD has been reported to be associated with systemic inflammation and obesity. However, there are no data that relate adipose tissue (AT) inflammation to MDD. The analysis of inflammatory markers in AT could pave the way to clarify the potential association between MDD and obesity. For this reason, the aim of our study was to...