Endocrine Abstracts

The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) published a report called Referring Wisely in June 2017. The report asked specialty physicians for a short list of conditions they felt would benefit from specialist input in the context of acute inpatient management (recommended referrals). It also asked for a list of conditions which need not be referred (avoid referrals).Methods: We retrospectively audited inpatient referrals from our electronic inpatient referral...

Thyroid cancer (TC) is the most common endocrine malignancy, with an increasing number of diagnosis in the last decades. Of all TC histotypes, the poorly differentiated and anaplastic TCs (PDTC and ATC) have a very poor prognosis because of their invasiveness and metastatic behavior, as well as their insensitivity to radioactive-iodine treatment. In the last years, the stem-cell model has been proposed to further explain TC carcinogenesis. According to this model, only a subse...

Oxidative stress (OS) can have an impact both in the pathogenesis and in the progression of TC, as it has been shown to induce oncogenes and inhibit tumor suppressors. The main source of cellular ROS is represented by NADPH oxidases (NOXs). Aims of the study were to investigate the NOX-derived OS in TC samples, benign nodules and corresponding normal tissues, and to correlate the level of OS with histological classification, genetic profile and clinical and prognostic features...

Thyroid cancer (TC) is the most common endocrine tumor and its incidence has increased faster than in any other malignancy. Although TCs are usually well differentiated, disease recurrence or persistence is high, because of local and distant metastasis and therapeutic resistance. As in other cancer types, despite the promising results obtained in pre-clinical studies, the efficacy of Targeted Therapy is highly variable and therapy resistance is not uncommon. This may be due to...

Obesity is linked to an increased risk of 13 different cancers in adulthood. The environment supporting this increased risk is multi-factorial but includes metabolic dysregulation, chronic inflammation and the loss of the anti-tumour activity of cells such natural killer (NK) cells. We present data which shows that this pro-cancer environment starts early in children with obesity, potentially increasing their risk of future disease. We investigated a cohort of 50 children with...

Background: Relapse rates in young people with Graves’ disease (GD) are around 75% after 2 years of antithyroid drugs (ATD). However, there is little mechanistic insight into the pathophysiology of relapse and a lack of robust predictive biomarkers. B cell subsets and related cytokines may reflect humoral immune activity, for which T cells have an important supporting role.Aims: The purpose of this study was to evaluate T and B cell subpopulations, ...

Background: Wolfram Syndrome (WS) is a rare autosomal recessive disorder characterised by early-onset diabetes and optic atrophy as well as a variable spectrum of other endocrine and neurological conditions. It is caused by mutations in the WFS1 gene. Previous reports have documented a variable prevalence of hypogonadism (6.3% of the international EURO-WABB registry, 34% of a German cohort); however the only UK cohort reported was of 10 males, 7 of whom had primary gonadal atr...

Background and Aims: Relapse in Graves’ disease (GD) often occurs after antithyroid drugs (ATD) are withdrawn, however there is a lack of robust predictive biomarkers for relapse and little mechanistic insight into its pathophysiology. B-cell related cytokines and chemokines may reflect humoral immune activity and therefore be predictive of outcome. The purpose of this study was to evaluate serum B-cell activating factor (BAFF), Chemokine ligand 13 (CXCL13), A-proliferati...

Background: HLA-DRB1*04 is one of the MHC alleles which is associated with several autoimmune endocrinopathies, including autoimmune Addison’s disease (AAD). The two versions of the gene which encodes the main target of the autoimmune attack in AAD, steroid 21-hydroxylase, are encoded in a gene cluster, called RCCX module, which is a copy number variation located in the MHC class III locus. Previous data from our group showed that AAD patients are more likely to have no c...

Dysbiosis of the gut microbiome contributes to the pathogenesis of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Reduced diversity and composition of the microbiome are associated with increased intestinal barrier permeability, increased bacterial translocation and NAFLD progression. The ALIOS diet in rodents replicates many of the metabolic and histological features of NAFLD in humans and here we report the effect of the ALIOS diet on the gut microbiome. Male and female C57BL/6 ...