Endocrine Abstracts

Case history: A 26 year old female with severe gastro-oesophageal reflux disease was seen in our service for assessment prior to roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) surgery for this condition. She had additional history of obesity, hypertension, insomnia, cholecystectomy for gallstones and anxiety-depression. At age 18 her weight was 85 kg, BMI 28 kg/m2. She gained 40 kg over the subsequent 8 years and in clinic was 123 kg, BMI 41.1 kg/m2 with a gynaecoid pat...

Section 1: Case history: A 30-year-old Romanian male presented to A&E with symptomatic hypoglycaemia (point-of-care venous glucose 1.8 mmol/l, laboratory value 2.0). He reported 2 days of intermittent left-sided abdominal pain and frequent food craving. Despite eating, he developed dysarthria, hyperhidrosis, somnolence and asthenia, associated with epigastric pain and vomiting. He was recently diagnosed with hepatitis C, discovered incidentally during investigations for ch...

A 65-year-old lady presented to the emergency department with breathlessness due to an exacerbation of chronic airways disease. Her past medical history included laryngeal carcinoma treated with total-laryngectomy, thyroidectomy and adjuvant radiotherapy in 2003. She remained on stable post-operative replacement doses of 125mcg of levothyroxine and 1mcg 1-Alfacalcidol/1g Sandocal TDS for hypoparathyroidism for several years. Three days prior to her admission, strontium ranelat...

Aim: Population studies have shown that basal calcitonin concentrations are below 10 ng/l in the normal population. Ten nanograms per liter is used as a diagnostic cut-off by most laboratories and patients with levels higher than this are offered a pentagastrin stimulation test to exclude medullary thyroid carcinoma. However, these guidelines were adopted from studies that used the Cisbio Immunoradiometric assay for measuring calcitonin. Most laboratories have now moved to che...

Context: Hydrocortisone day curves (HCDC) are used to monitor hydrocortisone replacement by obtaining serum samples to measure cortisol levels throughout the day. Salivary measurement of free cortisol offers a non-invasive alternative to serum measurements.Objective: To validate salivary cortisol measurement as an alternative method to assess the adequacy of hydrocortisone replacement in patients with hypoadrenalism.Setting, patien...

Background: Kisspeptin is a peptide product of the KiSS-1 gene and a key regulator of the hypothalamo-pituitary-gonadal axis. Pregnancy is associated with raised plasma kisspeptin concentrations. However, there is significant variation in the plasma kisspeptin levels quoted in previous studies. We investigated the effects of pre-analytical factors including processing time and anticoagulant type on plasma kisspeptin-immunoreactivity (IR) measurement.Meth...

Backgeound and Aims: Phaeochromocytomas (PCC) and paragangliomas (PGL) are mostly benign sympathoadrenal tumours. However, there are no available markers to predict a malignant course. Since hypoxia is involved in the pathogenesis of these tumours, we aimed to qualify the relevance of the mammalian Target of Rapamycin (m-TOR) and hypoxic pathways in benign and malignant PCC/PGL.Methods: Tissue microarray (TMA) blocks were constructed with 80 PCC/PGL, inc...

Background and Aims: Phaeochromocytoma and paragangliomas are neuroendocrine tumours arising from chromaffin cells. These tumours express somatostatin receptors (SSTRs), which has five different main subtypes (SSTR1, SSTR2, SSTR3, SSTR4 and SSTR5). The differential expression of the different receptor subtypes in these tumours has previously been reported with a small series of tumour samples. Our study examined the expression of SSTR subtypes in a larger series of benign and ...

Kisspeptin, the endogenous ligand of the GPR54 receptor, is a key regulator of the hypothalamo-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axis. GPR54-null mice exhibit reproductive dysfunction and exogenous kisspeptin potently stimulates the HPG axis in rodents, primates and human males. The effects of kisspeptin administration to human females are not known.Aim: To investigate the effects of kisspeptin on luteinising hormone (LH) release during the menstrual cycle in fema...

(This poster is based on OC17)...