Endocrine Abstracts

Chronic physical aggression has been linked to cortisol secretion and testosterone. Such links could be programmed by environmental effects on gene expression during pregnancy and early childhood. This paper will review research on the chronic aggression-cortisol-testosterone links and summarize a research program on pre and postnatal epigenetic programming....

Objective: Estrogen receptors α and β are members of the nuclear receptor family which regulate target gene expression in response to estrogens and to growth factor receptors-mediated pathways. CXCR4 is a chemokine receptor whose physiological ligand is the stromal-derived-factor-1 (SDF-1), a chemokine with proliferative and chemotactic functions. Recently, we reported that ERβ activity can be modulated by the tyrosine kinase ErbB2/ErbB3 receptors and also by th...

The identification of genomic determinants responsible for common multifactorial diseases like type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is facilitated in large families from relatively genetically-isolated populations and can extend results from GWS based on a case–control cohort to detect rare alleles with strong effects. In order to search for sequence variants conferring risk of T2DM we previously conducted a genome-wide linkage study in 108 French–Canadian families from t...