Endocrine Abstracts

Performance enhancing substances enjoy considerable popularity among athletes, particularly if deemed undetectable. Doping with growth hormone has been considered undetectable until recently. Two strategies have been pursued to detect GH doping: Pharmacological endpoints and GH isoform composition.For the former approach the consortium GH 2000/2004 has identified markers of GH action and found a combination of parameters from the IGF-system and collagen ...

Graves’ ophthalmopathy (GO) in the majority of cases is modest and self-limiting and no treatment is required beside local measures and prompt control of thyroid dysfunction. A minority of patients (3–5%) have severe GO which warrants aggressive treatment to arrest further progression and eventually achieve regression of existing ocular signs and symptoms. Treatment of severe GO is a complex therapeutic challenge and available treatments provide unsatisfactory result...

Objective: Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) is a complex genetic disorder. Body composition abnormalities, hyperphagia, progressive obesity and diminished growth hormone secretion are common. In a previous one year GH intervention trial in 19 PWS adults, we have shown beneficial effects on body composition. In the present study we sought to re-evaluate the cohort, with special emphasis on long-term effects of GH treatment.Methods: Fourteen patients, 7 men and...

Thyroid cancer accounts for ca. 90% of all endocrine tumours and ca. 60% of endocrine cancer deaths, with an increasing incidence of the disease worldwide. Disease recurrence and metastasis occur in up to 20% of patients. Many of the tumour-initiating events of thyroid cancer have already been identified. Overexpression of Galectin-3 and telomerase, point mutations in RAS and BRAF, rearrangements of the PAX8-PPAR gamma and RET genes have all been implicated in thyroid tumour i...

Osteoporosis is defined as a skeletal disorder characterised by reduced bone mineral density, predisposing a person to an increased risk of fracture. An estimated 3 million people in the UK suffer from the condition, most of these are women. Early intervention is important because bone loss is progressive and so is the risk of fracture.A 28 year old lady presented to a local hospital complaining of pain in her right hip which caused her to limp. She was ...

Type 1 diabetes mellitus has received much attention recently as a potential target for the emerging science of stem cell medicine. Advances in islet transplantation procedures now mean that patients with the disease can be cured by transplantation of primary human islets of Langerhans. A major drawback in this therapy is the availability of donor islets, and the search for substitute transplant tissues has intensified in the last few years. This review lecture will investigat...

Type 2 diabetes is a disease of insulin secretory dysfunction and insufficiency, that cannot compensate for the acquired insulin resistance. It has now been widely acknowledged that a major contributor to the pathogenesis of type 2 diabetes is a significant decrease in pancreatic ß-cell mass. An optimal pancreatic ß-cell population is normally maintained as a balance between net ß-cell growth (the sum of the extent of ß-cell replication, neogenesis and size...

In the US approximately 12,400 individuals <age 20 years are diagnosed with cancer yearly. Current 5-yr survival rates are in excess of 70%;it is estimated that there are 250,000 survivors of childhood cancer in the US today. These remarkable survival rates are due, in large part, to advances in cancer therapy that have occurred over the past 30 years. The vast majority of children and adolescents diagnosed with cancer are exposed to multi-modality therapy. Unfortunately, l...

In the absence of fractures, making the diagnosis of osteoporosis from radiographs can be imprecise. As there are now effective bone preserving and bone enhancing therapies which reduce future fracture risk, identifying patients at risk before fractures occur is relevant, hence the importance of bone densitometry.The method that is most widely used currently is dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA). This can be applied to axial and appendicular skeletal sites, uses very low r...

Hyponatraemia occurs in 14% of hospitalised patients. Our data shows that plasma sodium concentrations < 130 mmol/l occur in 8% of patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and in 6% of patients undergoing hypophysectomy. The causes of hyponatraemia in neurosurgical patients include SIADH, cerebral salt wasting (CSW), diuretic therapy, intravenous fluids, and glucocorticoid deficiency.The greatest diagnostic challenge is to distinguish between SIADH ...