Endocrine Abstracts

Critical illnesses are characterized by increased systemic cortisol availability, a vital part of the stress response. ‘Relative adrenal failure’ (later termed critical illness-related corticosteroid insufficiency or CIRCI) is a condition in which the systemic availability of cortisol is assumed to be insufficiently high to face the stress of the illness, and is most typically thought to occur in the acute phase of septic shock. Researchers suggested that CIRCI can b...

Survival rates for patients with cancer have continuously increased over the past decade as a result of more advanced cancer treatment. As a consequence, adverse side effects of cancer therapy becomes an important health issue for these cancer survivors. Male sterility is a relative common side effect of cancer treatment. This adverse fertility effect is caused by gonadotoxic effects as the cancer treatments not only effectively kill cancer cells but also destroy the progenito...

Treatment of osteoporosis is all about prevention of fractures. It relies on a combination of approaches, including adjustments to the patient’s diet and lifestyle, pharmacological therapy, and patient education. Changes to the patient’s diet and lifestyle typically involve: optimizing calcium and vitamin D intake and exercise levels, cessation of smoking and reducing alcohol consumption. Pharmacological therapies used to treat osteoporosis by reducing the fracture r...

Several differences have been observed in thyroid function parameters between older and younger individuals. Notably, circulating thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) levels gradually increase with age, a shift shown to extend to extremely high ages. While clinically abnormal thyroid function parameters have been consistently associated with ill health, the mechanisms underlying mild age-related variations in circulating levels of TSH and thyroid hormones and their health consequ...

Bone mineral density (BMD) and bone mass are quantitative traits that are the result of the two balanced processed of bone resorption and bone formation. Often they are used as a surrogate phenotype for the diagnosis of osteoporosis, characterized by an increased fracture risk due to a decreased bone mass and deterioration of the microarchitecture of the bone.Variation in BMD is determined by both environmental and genetic factors with 50–85% of the...

In recent years, scalp hair analysis had been successfully introduced as a novel biomarker for long-term cortisol levels. Traditionally used methods to measure cortisol (blood, saliva, urine) are complicated by the circadian rhythm and pulsatile way of cortisol secretion, as well as the influence of acute stress and day-to-day variation. In contrast to these short-term measurements, hair cortisol analysis allows to quantify the average cortisol production for a prolonged perio...

Critical illness is hallmarked by hypercortisolemia, traditionally attributed to stress-induced hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis activation. However, as low plasma ACTH concentrations and reduced responsiveness to ACTH have been reported, we hypothesized that reduced cortisol metabolism could play a major role. To systematically test this hypothesis, we recently performed six studies in matched ICU patients and healthy controls. These measured daily ACTH and corti...

Patient- and family center edendocrine cancer care encourages active collaboration between the departments of endocrinology, oncology, surgery, pathology, chemistry, radiology, nuclear medicine and clinical genetics. The implementation of high-throughput DNA/RNA sequencing platforms has allowed novel molecular information to be used to optimize primary endocrine cancer care including tumor classification, prognostic forecasting, stratification for targeted treatment in recurre...

Due to the pulsatile characteristic of pituitary hormone secretion, its involvement in the acute response to stress and feed-back mechanisms with hormones of peripheral glands, baseline circulating levels of many pituitary hormones may significantly overlap between normal subjects and patients with pituitary disease. Therefore pituitary testing has been widely used for the diagnosis and follow-up of pituitary disease.For example, provocative tests are fr...

The LH receptor (LHR) together with the FSH receptor (FSHR) and TSH receptor (TSHR) constitute a highly conserved subgroup of G protein-coupled receptors. Activation of these receptors requires the binding of the glycoprotein hormones to the long and divergent N-terminus of the receptor and the intramolecular signal transduction from the hormone-receptor complex to the transmembrane domain of the receptor. The main signaling pathway of the LHR, TSHR and FSHR is stimulation of ...