Endocrine Abstracts

Background: Craniopharyngiomas are benign tumors of the parasellar and sellar region. Patients with craniopharyngioma, treated with surgery, have comorbidities such as obesity and multiple pituitary deficiencies.Aim: To evaluate the metabolic parameters of patients with craniopharyngioma treated with surgery.Methods: We recruited 20 patients with craniopharyngioma (M=11, 46.6±12.6) and 20 patients (M=10, 53.5&#17...

ITT is the test of reference for the diagnosis of adult GH deficiency (GHD), but also GHRH in combination with arginine (ARG) or GH secretagogues (GHS) are considered equally reliable tests. Testing with GHS alone is, anyway, a potent stimulus exploring the integrity of hypothalamic pathways controlling somatotropic function.We therefore aimed to clarify the diagnostic reliability of testing with ghrelin, the natural GHS.We studied...

Introduction: The antitumor activity of a novel cyclic amide, CLM94, with anti-VEGFR-2 and antiangiogenic activity, in primary anaplastic thyroid cancer (ATC) cells in vitro and in vivo, has been studied.Design and Methods: CLM94 was tested: i) in two human cell lines (HMVEC-d, dermal microvascular endothelial cells; 8305C, undifferentiated thyroid cancer) at 0.001–100 mcM; ii) in ATC cells at the concentrations of 10, 30, 50 mcM; iii)...

The use of LC–MS/MS quantitative methods in clinical and research laboratories is becoming a well established reality that may overcome specificity and accuracy limits of immunoassays. Nevertheless, among different LC–MS/MS methods an agreement on the values that are to be considered normal or pathologic has not been reached yet, and this is mainly due to differences in LC–MS/MS methods, to the poor or absent availability of reference material and to the selecti...

To evaluate vitamin D levels in relapsing remitting (RR) and secondary progressive (SP) courses of multiple sclerosis (MS) and to evaluate correlations between vitamin D and clinical features of disease progression, in a southern Italy population. 63 (41 RR and 22 SP) ‘naive’ MS patients (47 females, 16 males aged 37.7±5.7 years) and 63 healthy controls were enrolled. Patients were assessed through clinical, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and laboratory invest...

Context: Until now the role of medical therapy in patients with primary hyperparathyroidism (PHP) was mainly based on the use of bisphosphonates. Recently, cinacalcet hydrochloride was reported to be effective in control hypercalcemia in PHP. The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of cinacalcet in PHP patients who were not effectively controlled with alendronate.Patients and methods: Fourteen PHP patients (mean age 64.1±2.6) were include...

Background: There is a growing body of evidence of an alteration in GH/IGF1 axis in neurological diseases. IGF1 and IGFBP3 serum levels are reported to be similar in controls, relapsing remitting (RR) MS and primary progressive (PP) MS patients, but in RR patients on IFN therapy they were found to be higher then in controls. IGFBP3 was found to correlate to progression index in PPMS.Objective: To compare IGF1 and IGFBP3 serum levels in RR MS and secondar...

Male transgenic (TG) mice overexpressing both the hCGα- and hCGβ- subunits present elevated levels of circulating hCG, Leydig cell hyperplasia/hypertrophy, elevated androgen levels and infertility (Rulli et al. 2003). In addition, serum FSH is significantly reduced in prepuberal and adult TG males compared with wild-types (WT), and does not change after treatment with the antiandrogen flutamide. The aim of this study was to evaluate the regulation of the hypot...

The endocannabinoid system is involved in modulating many metabolic and behavioural processes. Due to the instable nature of endocannabinoids in biological fluids and to the poor sensitivity of traditional analytical technologies, little is known about physiological circulating levels of these lipid mediators. We developed and validated an ID-LC-MS/MS method for the simultaneous measurement of four endocannabinoids: anandamide (AEA), 2-arachidonoylglycerol (2-AG), palmitoyl-et...

The development of a reliable and rapid method to simultaneously measure serum steroids represents a compelling challenge for modern endocrinology. Immunoassays are very sensitive methods, being widely employed in automated routine laboratories, lacking, however, in specificity due to cross-reactivity and matrix interference. Gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS) constitutes the reference method for quantitative analysis of steroids, but time-consuming sample pre-t...