Endocrine Abstracts

Background: Investigating longitudinal changes in serum androgen levels in healthy men in relation to (changes in) body composition, lifestyle factors and intercurrent illnesses.Methods: Longitudinal observational study. 999 healthy men aged 24–46 years of whom 691 were re-evaluated after a mean period of 12 years. Serum SHBG, luteinizing hormone (LH) and follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) levels were measured using immuno-assays. Testosterone (T), ...

IntroductionEven in healthy men, androgen levels start decreasing from early adulthood and these decreases are more pronounced in men with an increasing body mass index (BMI). It is, however, unclear to what extent changes in other indices of body composition and metabolic health are associated with changes in sex steroid exposure in healthy men over time.ObjectiveInvestigating longitudinal changes in body co...

Objectives: Graves’ disease (GD) is characterized by variable disease severity at diagnosis and variable disease activity during follow-up. Antithyroid drugs (ATD) such as carbimazole (CMZ), methimazole or propylthiouracil are the first-line treatment. Current guidelines recommend a range of ATD starting dose according to GD severity, followed by dose titration until euthyroidism is reached and a maintenance dose for a specific patient is established. As thyroid hormones ...

BackgroundAdrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is a rare but devastating tumour of the adrenal gland and the molecular mechanisms of pathogenesis remain incompletely understood. To gain novel insights into the cellular landscape of ACC, we compared single nuclei RNA sequencing (snRNA-seq) datasets from ACC and normal adrenal glands (NAGs).Methods: We isolated single nuclei from 12 ACC snap-frozen samples, including 6 primary tumours, 3 local r...

Background: Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is a rare and aggressive endocrine disease in which 60% of patients show endogenous glucocorticoid (GC) secretion that potentially contributes to a lack of immune cell infiltration and limited efficacy of immunotherapeutic approaches. In another study, we already demonstrated potent antitumor efficacy or ROR1 CAR-T cells in preclinical models of ACC. Nevertheless, solid tumors often show cell intrinsic resistance mechanisms to CAR-T c...

Introduction: Determination of serum (calculated) free testosterone (FT) in clinical practice has been suggested by several clinical guidelines for the diagnosis of male hypogonadism in men with borderline total T concentrations and in situations with altered sex hormone-binding globulin, as it correlates better with androgen exposure than total T. The gold-standard for the determination of FT levels is considered to be directly measured free testosterone (mFT) using equilibri...

Background: Small-bowel neuroendocrine tumours (SB-NET) commonly metastasise despite most being low grade. The NET nomogram developed, estimates 5- and 10-year survival in SB-NET by allocating scores for 15 clinicopathological parameters. We comparatively evaluated the prognostic power of this nomogram, the WHO/ENETS grading and AJCC/UICC staging systems.Methods: Patients with histologically-confirmed SB-NET were identified from databases at two tertiary...

Context: Mosaicism is a feature of several inherited tumor syndromes but is rarely systematically looked for in routine. MEN1 is an autosomal dominant hereditary syndrome characterized by several endocrine tumors affecting parathyroids, pancreas, and anterior pituitary most of the time, due to inactivating mutations in the MEN1 gene. Few cases of mosaicism in Multiple Endocrine Neoplasia type 1 (MEN1) have been described. MEN1 mosaicism is probably under-diag...

Introduction: According to the free hormone transport hypothesis, only free testosterone (FT) is considered biologically active. Due to low circulating levels and technical challenges of direct FT measurements, calculators have been developed to estimate FT from serum total T, sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG) and albumin levels. However, genetic polymorphisms altering SHBG’s binding affinity or capacity might result in calculation imprecisions with consequent incorrect...

Background and Aims: Type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) is characterised by autoimmune destruction of pancreatic beta-cells resulting in insulin deficiency. Evaluation of novel therapies for T1DM requires reliable methods to measure beta-cell function, which is unattainable using traditional non-invasive imaging techniques. A new approach is manganese-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MEMRI). As a calcium analogue, manganese is taken up into pancreatic beta-cells during insuli...