Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Secondary causes of diabetes refer to a category in which diabetes is associated with other diseases. They are thought to constitute less than 2% of the total cases of diabetes.Case report: A 56 year-old caucasian man, with no relevant medical history, presented to the Emergency Department with fatigue, polyuria, polydipsia, polyphagia and involuntary weight loss (6 kg in two weeks). He was hemodynamically stable and exhibited a glycaemia o...

Insulin resistance is defined as the incapacity of insulin to increase glucose uptake by peripheral tissues (skeletal muscle and adipose tissue principally). This phenomenon is present in different animal models for PCOS by prenatal exposure to androgens. In the PCOS condition, the metabolic pathway of insulin activity is defective in skeletal muscle and adipocyte whereas the activation of steroidogenesis is maintained. The decreased insulin stimulated glucose uptake is due to...

Introduction: The endocrine system is often affected in the course of HIV infection. However, hypopituitarism and diabetes insipidus are uncommon disorders in these patients and have been related to drugs, infections of the central nervous system and neoplastic infiltration, in extremely rare cases.Case report: We present a case of a 42-year-old man with HIV infection known since 2005, but undergoing antiretroviral therapy only since 2010 (emtricitabine/...

Prenatal and postnatal environment can regulate gene expression through multiple epigenetic mechanisms, being DNA methylation among the most relevant. Metabolic and reproductive function may be modified by this mechanism. Sons born to women with PCOS show altered markers of metabolic and reproductive function during childhood and adulthood. However, these functions have not been studied during puberty. The aim of the present study was to assess the global methylation pattern a...

Although the effect of aging on adipose tissue metabolism have been thoroughly studied for years, changes in the antilipolytic action of insulin in visceral white adipose tissue from aged rats are still not completely understood. By fact, some contradictory data on the inhibition of isoproterenol-induced lipolysis by insulin with aging have been reported. As aging is a significant risk factor for increasing adiposity and the development of obesity, we hypothesized that the inh...

Background: Continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion (CSII), alongside multiple daily injections (MDI) are the most frequent therapeutic of type 1 Diabetes Mellitus (DM). We aimed to evaluate the effects of the transition from MDI to CSII in the treatment of type 1 DM.Patients and methods: This retrospective longitudinal study analysed patients that received treatment with CSII from 2006 to 2014. Our sample had 85 patients, 35 male (41.2%) and 50 female ...

Introduction: The incidence of glucose metabolism alterations during the follow-up of surgically treated insulinomas is largely unknown. Our aim was to evaluate the incidence, and the clinical characteristics, of diabetes and prediabetes in this population.Methods: We retrospectively analyzed the cases diagnosed as insulinomas in a Central Hospital in Portugal in the period between January 1980 and December 2015.Results: We identif...

Introduction: Insulinomas are pancreatic endocrine tumors originating in the beta cells, characterized by hypoglycemia resulting from insulin hypersecretion.Objectives: To characterize the demography, the clinical features, imagiological findings and pathological evaluation of the cases of insulinomas identified in the previous 35 years at São João Hospital.Methods: We retrospectively analyzed the cases diagnosed as insul...

Prostate cancer (PC), the most commonly diagnosed malignancy among men, is a complex and heterogeneous disease that is highly influenced by the endocrine environment, which makes difficult the identification of novel therapeutic biomarkers to treat this pathology. Somatostatin (SST) is a pleiotropic neuropeptide that exerts its multiple biological functions, including tumor cell regulation, through a family of receptors (named sst1-5). Particularly, in this study we have found...

Rationale: Patients with morbid obesity may have vitamin D deficiency and bariatric surgery may exacerbate it due to factors such as lack of dietary compliance, reduced intake, malabsorption, etc.Objective: To study vitamin D deficiency prevalence in patients with morbid obesity before and after bariatric surgery and its relationship with other laboratory parameters.Methods: A retrospective study of 88 morbidly obese patients befor...