Endocrine Abstracts

Auto-immune thyroid diseases (AITD) such as Graves’ disease (GD) and Hashimoto’s thyroiditis (HT) which are archetypical organ specific auto-immune diseases are increasing in recent years and about 2–4% of women and up to 1% of men are affected worldwide, and the prevalence rate increases with advancing age. The AITD are characterized by the presence of raised serum antibodies directed against thyroid antigens. The development of antibodies to antithyroid micros...

This story began shortly before my time. My involvement came about through wartime work for the Navy on survival at sea, and an eccentric professor. In 1942 Hetherington & Ranson in the USA found that lesions in the ventromedial nuclei of the hypothalamus in rats cause obesity. The suggestion that a hormone was involved came from my Ph.D. project, published in the Journal of Physiology as a Communication in 1957 and a full paper in 1959. In a number of rats in parabiotic p...

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The adrenal glands secrete a variety of hormones from the cortex (steroids) and the medulla (amines) that when in excess lead to characteristic clinical syndromes. Dysregulation of the secretory pattern of these hormones or hypersecretion not enough to cause a clinically obvious syndrome is termed subclinical hyperfunction and is mainly found in primary adrenal lesions in the form of adrenal incidentalomas (AI). These are adrenal mass lesions usually >1 cm in diameter that...

Measurements of plasma concentrations of the O-methylated metabolites of catecholamines including metanephrine, normetanephrine and methoxytyramine have advantages over other biochemical tests used to diagnose phaeochromocytoma for several reasons: i) the metabolites are produced within chromaffin cells continuously from catecholamines leaking from storage vesicles; ii) the single largest source of these metabolites is from adrenal medullary chromaffin cells, but this p...

Genomic imprinting is an epigenetic mechanism by which a subset of our genes displays unequal expression of the maternal and paternal alleles; in many cases, one allele is fully silenced. It occurs because these genes are marked differently (by DNA methylation and/or histone modifications) in male and female gametes. These gamete-specific marks are maintained at fertilisation and perpetuated throughout development and adult life, such that the alleles of imprinted genes retain...

Sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG) transports sex steroids (androgens and estrogens) in the blood and regulates their access to tissues. In humans and other vertebrates, the liver produces the SHBG that circulates in the blood, and in most species the gene encoding SHBG is also expressed in the testis. The testicular cell types in which SHBG is produced vary between species; in most mammals, expression of the Shbg gene in Sertoli cells gives rise to a secreted protein ...

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