Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Acromegaly is characterized by high cardiovascular morbidity and mortality possibly due to increased prevalence of main traditional cardiovascular risk factors. It is not clear though whether the incidence of atherosclerosis is truly enhanced. Moreover recent in vitro studies show a protective role of (GH) and IGF1 (insulin-like growth factor-1) on the endothelium. As expression of endothelial regenerative reserve, endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) could...

Introduction: EURO-WABB is a European research project within the field of rare diabetes diseases. The general objective is to support efficient diagnosis, treatment and research for the overlapping rare genetic diseases Wolfram, Alstrom and Bardet-Biedl (WABB) syndromes.Methods: The project is supported by the EU DG-SANCO by the collaboration of 8 Associated Partners (AP) and 15 Collaborating Partners. University of Birmingham work as the Project Leader...

Gigantism is an extremely rare condition and hence the relevant literature is largely a series of case reports. We present data on patients with gigantism <20 years of age identified from Pfizer’s Acrostudy registry of patients treated with pegvisomant.Eleven patients (5M) were identified: IGF1 at diagnosis was 1.6×ULN (1.15–3.3), height +5 SDS (1.1–3.8) and age 14.5 years (4–19). The three youngest (4, 7 and 14 years) had pi...

GH hypersection results in biventricular concentric hypertrophy and a progressive contractile impairment whereas cardiac hypotrophy and impaired diastolic filling and left ventricular function have been reported in GH deficiency (GHD). No information on cardiac performances and structure are available about those acromegalic patients in whom successful treatment made their GH and IGF-I secretion similar to those in GHD patients. In order to study the functional and structural ...