Endocrine Abstracts

Changes in maternal dietary intake during gestation can affect muscle development1 and may be linked to the catabolic actions of hormones, such as glucocorticoids, which inhibits the insulin like growth factor 1 (IGF1) pathway. This study examines the potential effects of glucocorticoids and skeletal muscle adaptations in seven-day-old offspring exposed to suboptimal gestational environments.Pregnant sows were randomly assigned to a commercial...

Background: The pregnancy-specific condition pre-eclampsia (PE) affects ~2% of women contributing to neonatal and maternal morbidity and has been linked with a deficiency in selenium. The iodothyronine deiodinases all contain selenium and play crucial roles in determining the circulating and intracellular levels of the active thyroid hormone. It is hypothesised that due to the role of deiodinases in extrathyroidal production of T3, thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) will be inc...

Background: Therapeutic activation of thermogenic brown adipose tissue (BAT) is a potential strategy to prevent obesity and metabolic disease in humans. However, it is now recognised that rodent studies examining BAT physiology are carried out at sub-thermoneutral temperatures (e.g. ~20°C), and are not translationally relevant to humans as BAT is ‘hyperactive’. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine the effect of common regulators of BAT metabolism wh...

Brown adipose tissue (BAT) is present in small quantities in human adults (~100 g) and can have a significant influence on metabolism. This effect is mediated by rapid activation of the BAT specific uncoupling protein 1 (UCP1), following stimulation of β-adrenergic receptor (AR) by the sympathetic nervous system. AR agonists stimulate rodent BAT, but have so far provided inconsistent findings in humans when administered orally (Vosselman et al. 2012). Rapid activ...

Background: Size at birth has been shown to have important consequences on later health, including the development of the metabolic syndrome. Tissue sensitivity to cortisol is regulated, in part, by the GCR and alterations in GCR expression have been observed in obesity and type 2 diabetes.Objectives: To examine whether birth weight influences the expression of GCR mRNA in skeletal muscle (SM) at days 7 and 14 of postnatal life.Met...

The identification and characterisation of unique gene profiles expressed in specific adipose tissue depots around the body could provide novel insights on fat development.We report a comprehensive analysis of transcriptome from the five major (epicardial, pericardial, perirenal, sternal and omental) adipose depots from one week old sheep. This study also provides an integrated view of the preservation and differences between mitochondrial gene co-expres...