Endocrine Abstracts

Malignant paraganglioma causing skull metastasis is rare. We describe a 49-year-old male who gives a history of a mass on the vertex of the scalp, noticed a year before presentation and which grew rapidly from 1 cm to 5 cm. His past medical history is significant for hypertension (treated with Amlodipine), and back pain and headache on a regular basis. On MRI the mass measured 5.7 cm craniocaudal, by 7 cm AP and 6.9 cm transverse. Additionally, multiple additional focal areas ...

A 64-year-old man was referred with an incidental finding of multiple bilateral thyroid cysts following CT scanning for abdominal pain. He had originally presented with an acute episode of left upper quadrant pain. CT scan of the abdomen demonstrated multiple lesions in the liver compatible with simple cysts. There were also multiple bilateral renal cysts, of which the largest was 10 cm. A small amount of retroperitoneal fluid was seen, probably as a result of a ruptured cyst....

Phaeochromocytomas show a positive correlation between tumour size, metanephrines level and symptoms. Small tumours (<1 cm) are usually asymptomatic and are picked up through hereditary screening or surveillance of previous tumours. We present a 72-year-old gentleman who was referred to the Endocrinology service with symptoms of palpitations, sweating, dizziness and hypertension for several years. He was investigated for palpitations but no cardiac arrhythmias were present...

A 46 year old female presented to orthopaedics with a painful swelling at the base of the middle finger, which was gradually increasing in size. Ultrasound and x-ray showed a highly vascular irregular mass with bony involvement of the third metacarpal. Initial suspicions were of an enchondroma. Following an MRI scan, the orthopaedic team proceeded to biopsy the lesion. The histology suggested a giant cell tumour. Curretage of the lesion, with bone grafting was performed and fu...

We report a case of a false positive pentagastrin stimulation test in a patient with a positive family history for medullary thyroid cancer (MTC), but normal histology following total thyroidectomy.An asymptomatic 50-year-old man was referred urgently with an elevated calcitonin level of 19.9 ng/l (reference range<11.8), taken following the diagnosis of his brother with MTC which had been discovered on a routine private medical examination. There was...

Introduction: A persistently elevated parathyroid hormone (PTH) following parathyroidectomy is usually associated with vitamin D deficiency. We have previously demonstrated this to occur in ~60% of post-operative patients. We have examined the effect of routine vitamin D replacement pre-operatively on the proportion of patients with persistently elevated PTH post-operatively.Methods: Data was collated retrospectively from our parathyroid database, includ...