Endocrine Abstracts

Idiopathic central hypogonadism (ICH) is a rare and heterogeneous disease due to defects of GnRH secretion or action. Depending on the association with a normal or defective sense of smell, ICH could be respectively identified as normosmic ICH (nICH) or Kallmann’s syndrome (KS). Recent experimental evidences indicate the involvement of the new PROK2/PROKR2 pathway in GnRH neuron maturation and function and mutations affecting these two genes have been described in some IC...

Central Hypothyroidism (CeH) is a rare thyroid hormone production defect due to an insufficient stimulation of a normal thyroid gland. Candidate genes for isolated CeH include TSHβ (several cases reported) and TRHR (only one case reported so far). Here, we report the clinical and genetic studies in 2 males and 3 females affected with isolated CeH with normal/low TSH levels (0.05–0.95 mU/L) and low FT4 levels (3.6–4.6 pM). None of the patients was detected at neo...

ICH is a heterogeneous disease mainly due to functional defects of GnRH neurons. Recent studies have described the importance of prokineticin pathway in the pathogenesis of these defects. In a series of 166 ICH patients we found germline mutations affecting this pathway in about 10% of the cases. PROKR2 gene analysis revealed 3 novel (V158I, T260M, V334M) and 4 already known (L173R, R268C, V274D, V331M) mutations affecting different transmembrane and intracellular regions of t...

Idiopathic hypogonadotropic hypogonadism (IHH) is a rare and heterogeneous disease due to defects of GnRH secretion or action. IHH could be associated or not with anosmia respectively identifying the Kallmann’s syndrome (KS) or the normosmic IHH (nIHH). So far numerous causative genetic defects have been described, but very recent molecular genetic studies and animal models have opened novel perspectives. We are studying a series of 16 KS (14M,2F) and 18 nIHH (14M,4F). Al...

Mild hypothyroidism is a heterogeneous and frequent disorder in the general population that is due to autoimmune disease in most of the cases. TSH resistance is considered a rare genetic disease due to germline loss-of-function TSHR mutations. However, TSHR mutations have been mainly searched in patients with large TSH elevations and their actual prevalence among patients with mild TSH elevations (as those found in mild hypothyroidism) is so far unknown. In this study, we eval...