Endocrine Abstracts

Exposure to soy isoflavones (ISO), abundant in soy protein infant formula, during early postnatal life has benefits to bone health in female mice. Moreover, exposure during the first 10 or 21 days of life has been shown to interfere with structural development of female reproductive organs and results in heavier body weight. The study objective was to compare if shorter exposure to ISO, during the first 5 vs 10 days of life, results in lesser adverse effects on ovarian and ute...

Background: Hyponatremia (HN) is the most common electrolyte disorder of hospitalized patients. It occurs in up to 28% of in-patients, is more common in the elderly and patients with multiple co-morbidities, increases the in-hospital risk of death by 1.47-fold, and is associated with significantly higher mortality risk following discharge. The HN Registry is the first large-scale, international effort to document the clinical characteristics, choice of therapies, and impact of...

A well-term baby born to consanguineous healthy Yemenese parents was observed in the hospital as parents had lost previous three babies (both male and female) within 10 days of age (in Yemen). These babies who were initially well were reported to have developed a rash and then collapsed and died. Post-mortems were not done. This baby who appeared well at birth, also developed a facial rash on day seven and was found to have hyponatremia and severe hyperkalemia, albeit a normal...

Von-Hippel-Lindau syndrome (VHL) is an autosomal-dominant disorder associated with CNS haemangioblastomas, phaeochromocytomas, renal carcinomas and retinal haemangiomas. We present the case of a 33-year-old woman with VHL who developed clinical progression of a CNS lesion during pregnancy. The patient had undergone removal of a cerebellar haemangioblastoma at age 18, and bilateral phaeochromocytomas were removed at age 27. The only other abnormality on regular review was a mix...

Introduction: Hypertension remains a significant co-morbidity in the population with diabetes, with a prevalence of 20–60%. In type 2 diabetes, hypertension is often present as part of the metabolic syndrome of insulin resistance. In type 1 diabetes, hypertension may reflect the onset of diabetic nephropathy.Aims: To investigate the prevalence of, and to stratify, hypertension in our diabetes clinic population. To investigate prevalence of risk fact...

The pharmacology and function of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) is frequently studied following expression of a single receptor in heterologous cell lines. However, many GPCRs are co-expressed. We wished to investigate how expression of pairs of receptors might modulate their function. Using a Human Embryonic Kidney 293 cell line in which the CB1 cannabinoid receptor was expressed constitutively and in which varying levels of expression of the orexin-1 receptor could be i...

Novel object discrimination is a widely used ethologically relevant working memory task. However, there is little information regarding gender differences in performance of this test. The aim of this study was to compare the performance of male and female rats in this task following increasing intertrial intervals.Subjects were 24 female and 24 male adult hooded-Lister rats (250±10 g) group housed under standard laboratory conditions. Testing consis...

Background: Recommendations for the diagnosis of phaeochromocytoma are based on individual institutional experience but have traditionally advocated concurrent measurement of urine and plasma catecholamines. However, reports of phaeochromocytoma presenting with normal catecholamines suggest that this practice is insufficiently sensitive. In phaeochromocytoma there is an increased output of metadrenaline metabolites with a disproprtionate increase in the unconjugated form and e...

Replacement mineralocorticoid(MC)therapy in patients with primary hypoadrenalism is titrated according to clinical and /or biochemical criteria. No single objective assessment is adequate for monitoring,though targets for plasma renin and serum electrolyte concentrations and blood pressure(BP)have been proposed.Plasma renin concentrations within the middle to upper normal range would suggest adequate MC replacement. We reviewed the case notes of 18 patients in order to identif...

A 20 year old Asian housewife presented with a history of irregular periods and six months subfertility. On May 1 2002 she had a prolactin of 2,200 mIU/L (normal range 63-211) and subclinical hyperthyroidism : thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) 0.3mIU/L (normal range 0.4-5.5) and free thyroxine (fT4) 12.6 pmol/L (normal range 10.3-23.2). At her first hospital visit on September 9 2002 she was 9 weeks pregnant. She did not have hyperemesis gravidarum. On examination, she was cli...