Endocrine Abstracts

Hashimoto’s thyroiditis (HT) is the most common chronic autoimmune thyroid disease, which is characterized by alteration of the thyroid function. HT is a multifactorial disorder and several candidate genetic loci have been identified as contributing to HT. The transcription factor Nrf2, encoded by the NFE2L2 gene, is an important regulator of the cellular protection against oxidative stress. The relevance of selenoproteins in follicular thyroid cell physiology and in mole...

Background: Mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) is a downstream effector of the PI3K/AKT pathway. It can be activated by diverse stimuli, such as growth factors, nutrients, energy, stress signals and signaling pathways such as PI3K, MAPK and AMPK, in order to control cell growth, proliferation and survival. The active form of mTOR (pmTOR) may form two distinct complexes: mTORC1 that activates S6K1 and 4EBP1 which are involved in mRNA translation; and mTORC2 that activates PKC...

Osteopontin (OPN) is a matricellular protein highly expressed in cancer cells, which is able to modulate tumorigenesis and metastasis in several malignancies, including follicular cell-derived thyroid cancers (TC). OPN is one of the gene products aberrantly expressed in TC, but the contribution of each OPN isoform (OPNi), named as OPNa, OPNb and OPNc, is currently unknown. This study aims to analyze the expression profile of OPNi in TC tissue samples, correlate its expression ...

Thyroid cancer therapy is based on surgery followed by radioiodine treatment of tumor remnants and metastases. The incorporation of radioiodine by cancer cells is mediated by sodium iodide symporter (NIS), normally present in thyroid follicular cells’ membrane. We studied the expression of NIS in a series of 229 thyroid primary tumors using real time PCR and immunohistochemistry, and searched for possible associations between NIS expression and clinicopathological feature...

Objective: One of the hallmarks of cancer is its unlimited replicative potential. Recently, telomerase promoter (TERTp) mutations were presented as novel mechanism for telomerase re-activation/expression. Due to this fact, it was our objective to study pancreatic endocrine tumours (PET) and related cell lines, to determine if TERTp mutations were present.Design: We performed characterization of the TERTp in a series of 55 PETs and three common PET cell l...

BackgroundIn the 2002 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) a number of patients presented abnormalities in the thyroid functioning, neuroendocrine and calcium homeostasis. It was detected in autopsies from SARS Coronavirus (SARS-CoV) patients that the thyroid gland was significantly affected by the disease, with extensive injury and death of follicular and parafollicular cells. In the present SARS-CoV-2 pandemic some studies start to repo...