Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: A woman’s iodine requirements increase substantially during pregnancy to ensure adequate supply to both mother and fetus. The deficiency of this element may cause several maternal-fetal repercussions. For this reason, iodine supplementation for pregnancy has been recommended and the World Health Organization (WHO) commends an iodine urinary concentration at a median UIC 150–249 μg/l. As in many other countries around the world, there is evidence of...

Despite the importance of the Ret receptor, it is clear that other signal transduction pathways, tyrosine kinase receptors, and tumours suppressor genes are involved in MTC tumorigenesis and progression. Differences in the clinical behaviour of patients harbouring the same Ret mutations may be related to these other genes. Alterations of genes involved in the G1 phase of the cell cycle, including the cyclins, CDKs and CDK inhibitors, are common events in neoplastic development...

Introduction: Graves’ ophthalmopathy (GO) varies from minor changes to visible face disfigurement which may compromise the visual capacity and the aesthetics of the patient. These deformities affect the quality of life in both functional and emotional senses. There are some questionnaires designed to evaluate the patient’s health, quality of life and relationship with a specific disease. The use of these questionnaires is recommended to improve the quality of care an...

Sporadic medullary thyroid cancer (sMTC) presents mutations of the RET proto-oncogene in about 50% of the cases and of the RAS proto-oncogene in about 20% of the cases. In about 15% of cases, sMTC is multifocal and it is not known whether multiple foci can be considered as intrathyroidal metastases of the main tumor focus or if they can be considered as independent tumors. To clarify this issue, we examined the mutation profile of multiple intrathyroidal tumo...