Endocrine Abstracts

The incidence of diabetes, a disease characterized by high blood glucose levels, is increasing worldwide. Besides the well-known complications of diabetes including cardiovascular disease, retinopathy, nephropathy, and neuropathy, also bone fragility has recently been recognized as a complication of diabetes. In fact, type 1 diabetes is associated with a 6-fold increase in hip fractures with a marked loss of bone mineral density, while type 2 diabetes is associated with a 1.5-...

Skeletal lesions are a frequent complication of breast and prostate cancer. At present, 60–80% of patients with breast or prostate cancer develop bone metastases, which frequently result in skeletal-related events, including pathological fractures, pain, and neurological syndromes that require surgery or radiotherapy, and reduce quality of life. Autocrine and paracrine factors modulate various aspects of bone metastasis, including tumor proliferation, epithelial-to-mesenc...

Metabolic changes in Type-2 Diabetes-Mellitus (T2DM) make patients more prone to develop osteoporosis and delayed bone healing. We hypothesize that microRNAs could be involved in the underlying mechanism and used as biomarkers in this context. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed microRNAs in samples from Zucker Diabetic Fatty (ZDF) rats, a T2DM model with reduced bone healing and bone mass. 11-week-old male ZDF and wildtype rats with a femur subcritical defect were treated wi...

Glucocorticoids (GC) are one of the most potent anti-inflammatory pharmacological agents. However, owing to their pleiotropic nature, their clinical effectiveness is frequently limited by their deleterious off-target effects. Frequently, metabolic abnormalities arise from GC excess involving the development of dyslipidaemia, insulin resistance and muscle atrophy as well as excessive fat accumulation in both white adipose tissue (WAT) and the liver. In addition, suppressed ther...

Despite their therapeutic effectiveness, glucocorticoids’ (GC) clinical usage is frequently limited due to the deleterious metabolic effects. GC-induced obesity arises from excessive fat accumulation in white adipose tissue (WAT) as well as suppressed thermogenic capacity in brown adipose tissue (BAT). Since the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) plays a fundamental role in adipose tissue biology, we examined the interaction between GCs and SNS signaling in the adipose orga...