Endocrine Abstracts

The objectives of this study were to assess patients' knowledge on the management of steroid replacement therapy (SRT) and explore patient satisfaction with the management and education given on SRT.The study used a quantitative before and after one group design. Self-administered questionnaires were utilised for data collection (baseline and one month after the intervention of the Patient Information Leaflet (PIS) on Managing SRT) to assess knowledge an...

INTRODUCTION: Tissue microarrays (TMAs) are a powerful tool to analyze the clinical significance of tens of biomarkers on hundreds of tumors in a parallel fashion. Here, we used TMAs to survey the potential role of different markers as predictors of prognosis or therapy response in prostate cancer.MATERIAL & METHODS: Two different prostate TMAs were constructed. 1. A prognostic TMA with specimens from 657 patients with clinically localized prostate cancer and longterm ...

The natural history of thyroid eye disease (TED), the most frequent extrathyroidal manifestation of Graves' disease, is not completely understood, nor it is clear whether treatments for concomitant hyperthyroidism can influence it. Neither thionamides nor thyroidectomy appear to be disease-modifying treatments. What about radioiodine (RI) therapy? Results are conflicting, owing to selection bias, nonstandardized ocular evaluation, and the retrospective and uncontrolled feature...

Sexual dimorphism in fetal testosterone output in the silver foxLV Osadchuk; Institute of Cytology and Genetics, Novosibirsk, RussiaIn mammals physiological mechanisms regulating reproduction are sexually differentiated. A basic mechanism of sexual differentiation in mammals is that testosterone produced by the testes organise development of the genital tract, external genitals, gonadotrophin secretion and the capacity to display sex specific behaviour in the male dire...

Invertebrate model organisms are useful tools for research into ageing because they can be used to identify mechanisms of ageing that are conserved over large evolutionary distances. A picture is emerging of a conserved neuroendocrine axis that regulates reproduction in relation to nutrition, and that causes the rate of ageing to vary as a side-effect. Understanding the mechanisms by which this neuroendocrine axis impacts the ageing process is an important challenge for future...

Objective: Among severely obese individuals, surgically induced weight loss reduces the risk for type 2 diabetes. The aim of this study was to analyse the incidence and remission of type 2 diabetes among individuals with different degrees of obesity losing weight, and compare them with obese individuals remaining weight stable during follow-up.Research design and methods: The ongoing non-randomized prospective controlled Swedish Obese Subjects (SOS) inte...

Background: Loss of function mutations of the type-2 vasopressin receptor (V2R) in kidney lead to nephrogenic diabetes insipidus (NDI). The function of mutant receptors can be rescued using ligands resulting sufficient amount of plasma membrane localized V2Rs in a conformation which are able to generate cAMP signal. We examined a previously described, not characterized mutation. In order to determine personalized therapy for the individual the properties of the mutant receptor...

Objective: Postmenopausal period in women is associated with the accelerated bone loss, contributing to the development of osteoporosis, fractures and decreasing of quality and duration of life. The metabolic syndrome (MS), which includes obesity, dyslipidemia, hyperglycemia, and hypertension, is a major public health problem also.The purpose of our study was to reveal associations between tissue body composition, compounds of MS and BMD in postmenopausa...

Serum or plasma human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) immunoassays are a cornerstone in diagnosis and monitoring of pregnancy [1]. Although these assays show very satisfying performance, pathophysiological (e.g., menopause induced pituitary secretion of hCG, familial hCG syndrome, exogenous hCG injections) and analytical (e.g., interference of heterophilic antibodies or anti-hCG antibodies, lack of specificity of older assays) determinants may rarely cause false positive results ...

Key learning points• Adrenocortical tumors comprise frequent benign adenomas and rare aggressive carcinomas (ACC).• cAMP/PKA pathway plays a central role in the pathogenesis of cortisol-producing adenomas - associated with Cushing syndrome, while molecular alterations in Wnt/β-catenin, Rb/p53 pathway and chromatin remodeling are frequent in ACCs.<p class="a...