Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: The incidence of obesity and other features of the metabolic syndrome is increased in shift workers. This may be due to a misalignment between the internal circadian rhythm and the behavioral rhythm. The stress hormone cortisol could play a role in this phenomenon, because it is secreted in a circadian rhythm, and long-term elevated cortisol levels leads to components of the metabolic syndrome. Our aim was to study changes in long-term cortisol levels due to shif...

Introduction: The diagnosis of Cushing’s Syndrome (CS) and in particular cyclic CS can be complicated. Standard screening tests for CS are the measurement of cortisol in 24-hours urine collections and in midnight saliva. In case of cyclic CS, results of these tests can be normal in between periods of hypercortisolism. The development of a method to measure cortisol in scalp hair provides the opportunity to investigate historical cortisol levels of months to years ago, wit...

Introduction: Elevated levels of cortisol are known to induce a wide range of pathology, e.g. abdominal obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Measuring serum and saliva cortisol is limited to one time point. Measurement of cortisol in scalp hair is a recently developed method to measure long term cortisol levels and might reflect cortisol exposure in patients with hyper- or hypo-cortisolism and in healthy persons. Our aims were to explore this measurement of cor...