Endocrine Abstracts

A 41 year old woman presented with a 4 month history of oropharyngeal spasms precipitated by eating, yawning or talking. Such manouvres caused her to fear for her life due to profound choking and 'going blue';as a result she had stopped eating. On direct questioning she complained of circumoral tingling, paraesthesia and carpopedal spasm. She described profuse diarrhoea over the preceding year and had lost 15 kilograms. She was taking no drugs to interfere ith calcium homeosta...

Adverse effects of steroid excess on bone metabolism are well established but presentation of Cushing's syndrome with metabolic bone disease is reported to be uncommon. We describe a case of Cushing's syndrome presenting with pathological fractures probably present for 8 years before diagnosis.A 33 year old nurse first sustained spontaneous stress fractures of her metatarsals in 1994, with repeated fractures occurring up to 2002. In 2001 she developed hypertension, acute l...

BACKGROUND: Dynamic function tests are needed to diagnose a range of endocrine disorders but often require in-patient investigation. A recent audit of our endocrine service revealed deficiencies that included frequent delay to investigations and cancellation of planned appointments. We developed an Endocrine Nurse Specialist (ENS) post whose role included carrying out endocrine testing in an out-patient setting to assess whether this might improve quality of care for our patie...

It is recognised that growth hormone deficiency causes disturbances in reproductive function. Indeed growth hormone has been used for ovulation induction in the treatment of subfertility in women with hypopituitarism. During normal pregnancy growth hormone is produced by the placenta (placental growth hormone). From 15 to 20 weeks gestation placental growth hormone gradually replaces pituitary growth hormone in the maternal circulation and is the main determinant of maternal I...

BACKGROUND: An audit of facilities and medical and surgical care based on the 1997 Royal College of Physicians and Society for Endocrinology guidelines for the management of pituitary tumours was carried out in the South West in 2001. We present the results for patients referred to one specialist pituitary surgeon in Plymouth.METHODS: 1. A questionnaire was sent to each endocrinology department covering staff resources, facilities for investigations and the process of care...

INTRODUCTION: Hypertension with hypokalaemia suggests primaryaldosteronism, which is confirmed by high plasma aldosterone with low renin concentrations. CT and MRI scans frequently fail to detect small primary aldosteronomas, and may incorrectly identify ' incidentalomas', so adrenal vein sampling is needed.AIM: To review the clincal and biochemical results on 12 patients who had catheter sampling of adrenal and ivc aldosterone(A) and Cortisol (C)with calculation of Aldosteron...

In women, gonadotropin releasing hormone (GnRH) is secreted from the hypothalamus and conveyed via the portal vasculature to the anterior pituitary gland every 60-90 minutes. This binds GnRH receptor and triggers pulsatile release of gonadotrophin hormones, Follicle stimulating and Luteinising hormone (FSH and LH), which stimulate and regulate folliculogenesis. The interdependence of these events accounts for the high number of cycling disorders in women, and the origin of the...

Growth hormone (GH) acts chronically to decrease adiposity, at least in part by the inhibition of lipogenesis. One or more of the twelve isoforms of Protein kinase C (PKC) may be involved in this chronic effect of GH on lipogenesis in adipocytes.Two approaches were adopted to examine the role of PKC isoforms in GH signalling. The first method involved maintaining explants of Finn/Dorset sheep adipose tissue with insulin, GH or a combination of both, for ...

Introduction. As for many minor metabolites of steroids, no authentic standard is commercially available for 18-OH-THA. This compound is the principal urinary metabolite of 18-hydroxycorticosterone, a putative intermediate in the synthesis of aldosterone and of diagnostic value in screening for hypermineralocorticoidism. Since de novo synthesis is time-consuming and expensive, we tested the possibility of using beta-cortol, which produces an ion at m/z 457 in common wit...

Apoptosis or programmed cell death, is a principal mechanism controlling the physiological development of most living organs by removing unwanted cells without inducing an inflammatory response. It is known that in autoimmune thyroid conditions such as Graves' disease, thyroid cells die by apoptosis. Dysregulation of pro- and anti-apoptotic gene expression may be critical to the induction of the destructive process via the activation of a sequence of caspases (proteases).<...