Endocrine Abstracts

Aims and Objective: A transmembrane cell-adhesion protein, the Coxsackie-adenovirus receptor (CAR) serves as an entry receptor for enteroviruses and may be essential for their ability to infect cells. Since beta-cell enteroviral infection could contribute to the development of Type 1 diabetes, it is important that CAR expression is analysed in the human pancreas. CAR exists as at least 5 isoforms and we have studied the expression of these dif...

Background: The dexamethasone suppression test (DST) is among essential tests for hypercortisolism diagnosis. Due to high sensitivity and specificity, liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) is replacing obsolete immunoassays (IA) for steroid measurement. However, exhaustive data about IA and LC-MS/MS concordance in the frame of DST are still not available.Aim: To compare cortisol measurements by two routine IAs and LC-MS/MS in basal (F...

Context: Although Trabecular Bone Score (TBS) has been widely and independently associated with fragility fractures, its diagnostic power in certain populations remains to be established. Women initiating aromatase inhibitors for breast cancer should be screened for bone health to prevent cancer treatment-induced bone loss as much as possible. TBS is regarded as an adjunctive tool to evaluate these patients, but thresholds of pharmacologic interventions are still a gray zone, ...

Background: Steroid profiling by LC-MS/MS is increasingly used in endocrine research, and is being introduced in the clinical practice. Due to the large disagreement with previous immunoassays, and to the enlarged panel of measurable steroids, novel and robust reference intervals (RIs) need to be established. Steroid circulating levels are known to be influenced by several physio-pathological factors, such as age, gender, stress and metabolic status. Therefore, generating unbi...

Endocrine clinical practice strongly relies on normative data for the assessment of hormonal imbalance. However, the generation of robust steroids reference intervals (RIs) remains a challenge. As the steroids circulating levels are influenced by many procedural aspects related to blood collection (time, fasting state) and physio-pathological factors, such as age, sex, stress and metabolic status, the need for partitioning RIs is mandatory. Furthermore, unbiased healthy, drug-...

Cushing disease and hypophosphatasia are rare conditions that may be both responsible of an important impairment of bone metabolism with increased fracture risk. We reported for the first time a case of a 43-year-old woman that came at our attention for recent onset of alopecia and amenorrhea. At the anamnesis, she denied any past relevant events and no drug assumption. At the physical examination, she presented rubeosis and facies lunaris and central adipose distribution (wai...

Background: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-protein encoding RNAs which negatively regulate gene expression. Tissue miRNA profiles may be useful to distinguish benign from malignant lesions. Recently, we have identified in the serum of a retrospective series of patients, with benign nodular goiter (n=80) and papillary thyroid cancer (PTC: n=79), two miRNAs (-190 and -95) that in combination (providing the risk of malignancy defined as pmiRNA) allow the diffe...

Endocan has been reported as specific of endothelial tumor cells and was shown to be expressed by tip cells during angiogenesis process.The principal aims of the study are the assessment of immunohistochemical VEGF and Endocan expression in functioning and non functioning pNETs and the comparison of these markers with clinical features, Ki67 and TNM staging.We collected a total number of 79 pNETs surgical specimens for immunohistoc...

Hypothyroidism is a risk factor for obesity, central adiposity and ectopic fat accumulation. To assess whether this risk could be detected also in stable patients taking regularly the LT4 replacement therapy we assessed retrospectively the prevalence of metabolic syndrome (ATP III definition) and calculated the fatty liver index (FLI) and the visceral adiposity index (VAI) in patients attending our Outpatient Endocrinology Clinic because of known primary acquired hy...

Background: Subclinical Cushing’s syndrome (SCS) is defined as alterations in hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis without classic signs or symptoms of glucocorticoid excess. This condition has been associated to increased risk of adverse metabolic and cardiovascular outcomes, independently of other potential risk factors. However, is still not known if this condition could lead to a higher mortality respect to non-secreting adrenal masses (NSA).<p class="abs...