Endocrine Abstracts

One in 11 women develop breast cancer before the age of 75, and mortality is significant. Estrogens and progesterone (PROG) are mediators of breast cancer aetiology and progression, and are targets for both diagnostics and therapy. The actions of estrogens via estrogen receptor alpha (ERα) have been extensively studied, but the genomic actions of PROG via the progesterone receptor (PGR) are still not fully understood. This study investigates the genomic actions of PGR in ...

Seaweed consumption results in high levels of iodine intake in Asian populations and influences the presentation of thyroid and perhaps extrathyroidal disorders. The relationship of seawater to seaweed is analogous to that between the bloodstream and the thyroid. However, seaweed has a dramatically more efficient uptake system than the thyroid, concentrating iodide from seawater by a factor of up to 106 compared to 40-50 for the thyroid. The ability of seaweeds to b...

Obesity and its major consequence, type II diabetes mellitus (T2DM), is epidemic throughout Western society. T2DM accounts for 95% of the diabetes worldwide. One limitation to the development of new diabetes treatments has been a lack of effective animal models to use in research. There are no rodent models that recapitulate the pancreatic β-cell lesions of humans with T2DM. Moreover, animal models of obesity either require overfeeding which is expensive and takes weeks t...

The nuclear receptor PPARgamma is important for biological processes including adipogenesis and glucose homeostasis. In subjects with severe insulin resistance, we have previously reported two types of human PPARgamma gene defect: heterozygous, missense mutations (P467L, V290M) in the ligand binding domain (LBD) which inhibit wild type (WT) receptor action in a dominant negative manner by recruitment of transcriptional corepressors; or double heterozygosity for a frameshift/pr...