Endocrine Abstracts

Kisspeptins are the product of the KiSS-1 gene, a metastasis suppressor gene, and play important physiological roles in the hypothalamo-pituitary gonadal axis and reproduction. It was reported that kisspeptin-10 stimulated the aldosterone synthesis in H295R human adrenal cancer cells (Nakamura et al., 2007). However, expression of kisspeptin and its receptor has not been studied in tumor tissues of adrenocortical tumors. The aim of the present study was therefore to clarify ex...

Introduction: Bile acid binding resins (BABRs), anion exchange resins developed as medication for hypercholesterolemia, have been reported to improve glycemic control in patients and animal models with type 2 diabetes mellitus. Although the mechanism has not been clarified yet, we suspect that diverse factors including peripheral bile acid composition and incretins play significant roles in the effect. Besides BABRs, bile acids (BAs) administration has been recently reported t...

Introduction: Pheochromocytoma (PHEO) is a rare tumor of chromaffin cells with variable clinical presentation. Adrenal PHEOs secrete excessive amounts of noradrenaline or of noradrenaline plus adrenaline, whereas extra-adrenal PHEOs (paragangliomas) mostly secrete noradrenaline alone due to lack of expression of phenylethanolamine-N-methyltransferase (PNMT), the key enzyme converting noradrenaline into adrenaline. We report two exceptional cases of paragangliomas responsible f...