Endocrine Abstracts

Objectives: No immunohistochemical marker has yet been established to reliably differentiate adrenocortical tumors from other adrenal masses (e.g. metastases). Thus, a panel of several markers like melan A and inhibin is currently used for this purpose, but suffers from limited diagnostic accuracy. We hypothesized that expression of steroidogenic factor 1 (SF-1), a nuclear transcription factor involved in adrenal development and steroidogenesis, might hold significant diagnost...

Introduction: Glucocorticoids (GC) are used for immunosuppression in many clinical conditions. Pre-clinical and early clinical studies suggested that the induction of regulatory T (Treg) cells contributes to the immunosupressive effects of GCs. However, in the hitherto reported clinical studies only patients with ongoing autoimmune diseases were included. Our goal, therefore, was to determine the influence of exogenous GCs in vivo in immunocompetent subjects and mice.</...