Endocrine Abstracts

It is becoming increasingly evident that pathways exist within the (ER) that can impact upon cellular redox status, glucocorticoid metabolism and glucose homeostasis.Within the ER of the liver, glucose-6-phosphatase (G6Pase) and glucose 6-phosphate (G6P) transporter (G6PT) work together to increase blood glucose concentrations by performing the terminal step in both glycogenolysis and gluconeogenesis. The G6Pase ‘shares’ G6P with hexose-6-phosp...

Growth through the pubertal progress is notoriously difficult to track and interpreting abnormal patterns is tricky. Current growth charts are unhelpful. I will present new analyses of understanding of growth patterns and the tempo of pubertal changes and how they all link together. The RCPCH has launched a specialist growth chart in June to help identify and diagnose abnormal growth patterns during puberty. These include growth centiles for extremes of stature and weight, and...

Once induction of puberty has been completed the options for sex steroid hormone replacement change to take in to account long term health outcomes and the issues of transition from pediatric to adult care. With regard to the late stages of development, some thought has to be given to the fact that bone mass continues to increase to reach a peak at about the age of 25. It may not be until the age of 18 that meaningful bone density results can be obtained. For those who are slo...

Thyroid hormones T4 and T3 regulate many different physiological processes in different tissues in vertebrates. Most of the actions of thyroid hormones are mediated by the thyroid hormone receptor (TR), which is a member of the nuclear receptor superfamily of ligand-activated transcription regulators. There are two different genes that encode two different TRs, TR alpha and TR beta, and these two TRs are often co-expressed at different levels in different...

We have proposed twelve years ago that bone mass accrual, energy metabolism and reproduction must be coordinately regulated by hormones that would appear during evolution with bone. This hypothesis has been tested and verified in several ways one of them being to show that osteocalcin, the most osteoblast-specific secreted protein, is a hormone that regulates insulin secretion, glucose homeostasis, energy expenditure and male fertility. The metabolic function of osteocalcin ha...

The presence of a craniopharyngioma, and/or treatment related damage to centres in the hypothalamus that regulate energy balance often results in severe obesity and abnormal eating behaviours. This may be exacerbated by hormonal deficits from coexistent hypopituitarism.Decreased activity of sympathoadrenal activity, deregulated parasympathetic activity, marked hyperinsulinaemia and elevated leptin disproportionate to fat mass are evident. Plasma levels o...

Hereditary pheochromocytoma/paraganglioma (PHEO/PGL) syndrome is a rare disease. It has been demonstrated that about 25% of the apparently sporadic PHEO/PGL are due to a germ line mutation in one of the susceptibility genes, such as, VHL, RET, NF1, TMEM127, MAX and the genes encoding the four subunits of the mitochondrial enzyme succinate dehydrogenase (SDH) as well as the gene encoding one SDH assembly factor, SDHAF2. SDH is located in the inner mitochondrial membrane and is ...

Gender Identity Disorder (GID) is a condition in which a person experiences discongruency between their assigned sex and what they feel their genderidentity is. A person with gender dysphoria experiences persistently uncomfortable feelings about their birth gender (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth edition (DSM-IV) (American Psychiatric Association, 1994).During the ‘real life experience’ hormonal treatment starts an...

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...