Endocrine Abstracts

At our department of Endocrinology a 44-year-old patient with typical clinical signs of Cushing’s disease presented. Diagnostic procedure showed an ACTH-producing adenoma of the pituitary gland, so the patient underwent transsphenoidal surgery. Afterwards, hypercortisolism persisted and was treated with Ketoconazole. After a short period of time a pituitary hemorrhage occurred and resulted not only in a complete remission of Cushing’s symptoms, but also in hypopituit...

Objective: Insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1) is associated with metabolic parameters and involved in glucose metabolism. Low IGF1 has been implicated in the etiology of glucose intolerance. However, epidemiological data are scarce and the role of IGF1 in prospective studies is not clear to date.Research design and methods: We measured IGF1 levels in 7665 subjects free of diabetes from two German prospective cohort studies, the DETECT study and SHIP and...

Objective: The majority of circulating testosterone is bound to sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG), but also to albumin and cortisol-binding globulin. The remaining part is free-circulating testosterone unattached to serum proteins, which represents the active form of the hormone. A common measurement of the free testosterone is the calculated free testosterone index (FTI)=100*(total testosterone/SHBG). Testosterone is the principal male sex hormone and is involved in the reg...

Objectives: While evidence for an increased risk of hypertension in both overt hyperthyroidism and overt hypothyroidism is consistent, the relation between subclinical hyperthyroidism and blood pressure has not yet received sufficient attention. We aimed to investigate possible associations of decreased serum thyrotropin levels and subclinical hyperthyroidism with blood pressure, pulse pressure, and the risk of hypertension.Design: The population-based c...

Context: Previous studies suggest that total testosterone levels influences lipid metabolism. It has not been investigated whether these levels are prospectively associated with an unfavourable lipid profile including increased risk of incident dyslipidemia.Design and setting: We used data of 1468 men aged 20–79 years, repeatedly examined in the population-based Study of Health in Pomerania. Serum total testosterone levels, measured by chemiluminesc...

Objective: Pheochromocytoma is a rare disease with an incidence of 2–6 per million, and a prevalence of 0.1–0.6% in patients with hypertension. Pheochromocytoma may occur sporadically or as part of hereditary syndrome. According to the latest studies, among patients with non-syndromic pheochromocytoma, up to 24% of tumors may be inherited. However, genetic testing was not generally performed until recently. There is still a debate which pheochromocytoma patient shoul...

Objective: Age- and gender-specific reference values for quality of life (QoL) measures are important to assess the impact of growth hormone deficiency (GHD). The objective of this study was to develop population-based data for the QoL-AGHDA instrument for Germany and to compare this data with corresponding Qol-AGHDA scores of the German KIMS cohort during growth hormone treatment, to investigate the association between the Qol-AGHDA score and the IGF-1 values in the German KI...

Background: Obesity is a major risk factor for the development of chronic diseases and a determinant of cardiovascular disease. Divergent associations between obesity and hormonal changes have been reported. The objective of the present study was to analyse the associations between different anthropometric measurements and serum hormone levels including insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), thyroid-stimulation hormone (TSH), prolactin, and testosterone.M...

Background: Acromegaly is associated with increased morbidity and mortality from cardiovascular disease. Several studies indicate that reduction of growth hormone (GH) to <1 μg/l or normalization of serum IGF-I reduces mortality to expected levels. Inflammatory markers, such as C-reactive protein (CRP) or haemostatic markers, such as fibrinogen have emerged as important cardiovascular risk markers in the general population.Objective and design: ...

Background: Prospective studies showed that low serum testosterone concentrations are associated with various cardiometabolic risk factors and mortality. But the causal nature of these associations is controversial.Methods: We studied 1882 men aged 20–79 years with serum testosterone concentrations and genotyping data from the longitudinal population-based Study of Health in Pomerania.Testosterone concentrations were cross-sec...