Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Immunoassays are important tools in the diagnosis and management of disease; however, they are not free from interference by cross-reacting substances. Discordant clinical evidence and laboratory results raised suspicion of interference in a patient with persistently raised parathyroid hormone.Case Presentation: Case description: A 56-year-old Caucasian female previously diagnosed with hypothyroidism consistently demonstrated elevated PTH l...

Background: Vitamin B12 (B12) insufficiency is common in pregnancy and independently predicts insulin resistance (IR) in the offspring. B12 is an important key nutrient for epigenetic programming through regulating DNA methylation. Such B12 DNA methylation may influence leptin, a strong candidate for methylation, which could impact both insulin resistance (IR) and associated neonatal metabolic risk. Therefore, we hypothesize that leptin can be programmed by maternal B12 which ...

Studies in India (vegetarian population) show that vitamin B12 insufficiency is common in pregnancy and independently predict adiposity and insulin resistance in the offspring. Epigenetic programming is postulated as, along with folic acid, B12 is crucial for DNA methylation. Therefore, we investigated whether maternal B12 levels in a non-vegetarian UK population predict metabolic risk of the offspring.Paired maternal venous and cord blood samples (n...

Background: Assays for parathyroid hormone (PTH) are not standardized and therefore method-specific reference intervals are necessary for interpretation of results. PTH increases with age in adults but age-specific reference intervals for the Abbott intact PTH (iPTH) assay are not available. It is challenging and resource intensive to derive age-specific reference intervals by direct method because, depending on number of age partitions, samples from a large n...