Endocrine Abstracts

Primary aldosteronism (PA) has a prevalence of about ten percent in a hypertensive population and is an important risk factor for cardiovascular disease. The aldosterone to renin concentration ratio (ARR) is an established diagnostic tool in the screening for PA. However, hormonal determinations are time-consuming and expensive. Therefore, we studied the value of the sodium to urinary sodium to potassium to urinary potassium (SUSPUP) ratio in 37 patients with PA, in 34 hyperte...

Introduction: Neuroendocrine tumors (NET) are heterogenous tumors with variable survival and the frequently occurring ability to metastasize. A basis for metastasis of tumors is invasive growth. One factor participating in this process is the existence of the so called ‘circulating tumor cells’ (CTC) in the peripheral blood. Up to now there is only rare data available regarding the number of CTCs in NET patients.Methods: EpCAM protein expressio...

Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is part of the Li-Fraumeni tumour syndrome which is due to germline mutations in TP53. Recent studies demonstrate low penetrance mutations leading to later tumour manifestation. Furthermore, in ACC mutations outside the hotspot region have been found. TP53-polymorphisms have also been described to impact on p53 function. We, therefore investigated TP53 sequence alterations in a large cohort of adult patients with ACC.Method...

Objective: Addison’s disease (AD) is a rare and complex endocrine disorder. Genetic susceptibility loci known so far are predominantly shared with other, more frequent autoimmune endocrinopathies. We therefore investigated polymorphisms of the CTLA4-region, the vitamin D system (vitamin D receptor VDR, CYP24 and CYP27B1 gene) as well as cytokine CXCL10 gene for their association in AD.Methods: Patients with AD (n=203) and healthy controls (<i...

A patient was referred to us because he had hypokalemic hypertension and no detectable blood concentrations of renin and aldosterone. In addition, this patient had an adrenal mass. Since he was hyponatremic, he was put on fludrocortisone.At presentation, we found that the patient was normonatremic and hypokalemic and had a high sodium to urinary sodium to potassium to urinary potassium (SUSPUP) ratio. But review of older laboratory results showed an inad...

Most recently, a completely new subset of NK cells with immunosuppressive functions has been identified. These cells are able to downregulate conventional NK cells in a PD1-ligand dependent manner and are, therefore, responsible for tumor outgrowth.The aim of our present study was to investigate the role of this new NK subset in autoimmunity. For this purpose, we used two independent mouse models. In the NOD mice, we found a large increase of suppressive...

Despite their nature of being clinically inapparent, subtle laboratory abnormalities are sometimes detected in patients with adrenal incidentalomas and the question arises whether these changes justify surgical intervention in a patient with an otherwise benign adrenal tumour. Therefore, we aimed at finding further expressions of adrenal hormone excess that reflect net glucocorticoid action.Since glucocorticoids are potent immune suppressants we studied ...

Objective: Recently, we have shown that endothelial cell-conditioned medium (ECCM) stimulates aldosterone secretion and the expression of proteins, essential for steroidogenesis and adrenal development. Also, we have found that fat cells regulate adrenal steroidogenesis through the wnt-signaling pathway. In addition, β-catenin was implicated in adrenal tumorigenesis, including aldosterone-producing adenomas.Methods: We studied the influence of endot...

Subtype identification is necessary for making diagnostic and therapeutic decisions in primary aldosteronism. We studied clinical, hormonal and histological features of sporadic solitary aldosterone- and cortisol-cosecreting (C/APA) adenomas in detail.We here present the endocrine evaluation at baseline, after suppression with fludrocortisone and dexamethasone as well as after therapy with spironolactone and after unilateral adrenalectomy in two patients...

Autonomy of ACTH secretion has been described in patients with chronic dysinhibition of ACTH secretion. We here present the very unusual case of a 31-year old female patient who had congenital adrenal hyperplasia and developed Cushing’s disease, including clinical examinations, laboratory data, endocrine function tests, histological and genetic analyses.The affected patient had clinical signs and a typical history of hypercortisolism. Endocrine func...