Endocrine Abstracts

In young patients osteoporosis is associated with endocrine and inflammatory conditions. Early identification of osteoporosis may reduce later morbidity.We aimed to establish the aetiology of low bone mineral density (LBMD) in young patients at our centre. We identified risk factors and impact of gender on BMD in a young at-risk cohort.All patients between 20 and 55 years old who underwent DXA scan between 2004 and 2009 were identi...

A 68-year-old female was found to have a supra sellar mass on CT scanning for investigation of long-standing tremor. She had experienced thirst, polydipsia, polyuria, nocturia and malaise for 1 year. Primary hypothyroidism had been diagnosed 5 years earlier. A left temporal visual field defect found 3 years earlier had been attributed to a structural anomaly of the optic nerve head. MR scanning confirmed the presence of a mass lesion of the infundibulum with displacement of th...

Thyroid cancer if associated with bony metastases carries a poorer prognosis. Intensive multimodality treatment is usually necessary in management of these patients.Case: A 51-year-old female presented with hoarse voice in October 2005. Examination revealed a 3 cm left sided thyroid nodule and left vocal cord palsy. CT neck/thorax showed a multinodular goitre, with a dominant left nodule. FNA showed appearances suggestive of a follicular neoplasm. She un...

Small cell lung cancer (SCLC) is an aggressive neuroendocrine tumour that shows early metastasis and resistance to chemotherapy. Current biomarkers focus on prognosis and diagnosis but there is a need to find novel biomarkers, which could, for example, identify patients at risk of cerebral metastases.Pro-opiomelanocortin (POMC), the precursor of ACTH is a well-recognised biomarker of the ectopic ACTH syndrome1, of which SCLC is the most preval...

Context: HIF-1α is frequently upregulated in many tumour types and has been shown to be critical for radio- and chemosensitivity in pre-clinical studies. However the regulation and function of HIF-1α is unknown in thyroid carcinomas.Objectives: Here, we evaluated basal expression and regulation of HIF-1α and target genes in primary thyroid carcinomas and in thyroid cancer cell lines (NPA, FTC-133, ARO).Design and out...

Pituitary tumor transforming gene (PTTG) is a multifunctional oncogene implicated in the pathogenesis of pituitary and thyroid tumours. In breast cancer, PTTG expression is a prognostic marker for lymph node invasion and tumour recurrence. PTTG expression is regulated in vitro and in vivo by oestrogen treatment. PTTG binding factor (PBF) is also a transforming gene, and was isolated due to its functional interaction with PTTG. In the current study, we examined PB...

The ability of the thyroid to accumulate iodide provides the basis for radioiodine ablation of differentiated thyroid cancers and their metastases. Most differentiated thyroid tumours exhibit reduced iodide uptake, however, and the mechanisms accounting for this remain poorly understood. Pituitary tumor transforming gene (PTTG) is a proto-oncogene implicated in the pathogenesis of thyroid tumours. We recently reported that PTTG and its binding factor PBF, also a potent transfo...

Patients with craniopharyngioma have increased mortality attributed to cardiorespiratory disease, when compared to other hypopituitary populations. There is little data on the cause for excess of fatal respiratory disease in this condition. Clinical observation had identified sleep apnoea in some craniopharyngioma patients in our cohort. Sleep apnoea increases cerebrovascular and cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Our hypothesis was that sleep apnoea could be a contributo...

Differentiation between non functioning pituitary macroadenomas (NFPA) and prolactinomas may be difficult as hyperprolactinaemia can also be present at diagnosis in NFPA cases due to pituitary stalk compression (disconnection hyperprolactinaemia). Some authors suggested that prolactin >2,000 mIU/l is almost diagnostic of a prolactinoma, while others use a higher cut-off of >5000 mIU/l. Our aim was to identify the level of prolactin above which a prolactinoma was more l...

Studies on the probability of recurrence of surgically treated but radiotherapy (RT) naïve non-functioning pituitary adenomas (NFPA) are inconsistent and selective as cases deemed to be at high risk of recurrence were prophylactically irradiated. We traditionally used very low rate of post-operative RT leaving us with a largely unselected cohort.We identified 223 surgically resected, histology-proven NFPA cases. Only 9% received post-operative RT an...