Endocrine Abstracts

Context: High maternal TSH and/or low FT4 during pregnancy is associated with an increased risk of premature delivery. hCG is the main determinant of thyroid function changes during pregnancy but has a versatile pattern with high inter and intra-individual variability. We hypothesised that the correct interpretation of thyroid function tests and its use in the risk assessment of premature delivery during pregnancy depend on hCG levels.Design, ...

Background: Patients with medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC), a neuroendocrine tumour derived from the parafollicular C-cells, often present with metastasized disease. Survival strongly correlates with stage of disease at diagnosis, illustrating the need for early diagnosis. Calcitonin (CT), a well-established tumour marker for MTC, is limited by a high rate of false positives in the screening phase. Promising new markers for MTC are procalcitonin (PCT) and progastrin releasin...

Background: Over the last few decades, in vivo animal experiments have been the gold standard for the assessment of safety of chemicals and pharmaceuticals for human health. However, in vivo animal data has limited relevance for toxicity prediction in humans, especially considering species-specific issues of age, sex and exposure in different life-stages. Within the Virtual Human Platform for Safety Assessment (VHP4Safety) project we aim to develop an animal-...

Objective: Thyroid peroxidase antibody (TPOAb) positivity is the most important risk factor for overt/subclinical hypothyroidism and partly guides levothyroxine treatment indications during pregnancy. TPOAb positivity is usually defined by manufacturer cutoffs which are typically derived in non-pregnant populations with concentrations ≥95th percentile. Besides the general lack of assay uniformity, current TPOAb positivity cutoffs are likely to underestimate gestational t...

Objective: Adequate thyroid hormone availability is essential for foetal neurodevelopment. While overt maternal hypothyroidism is associated with lower offspring IQ, recent studies suggested an inverse U-shaped association, with suboptimal offspring neurodevelopment for both the lower and higher thyroid function range. Our aim is to investigate the association of gestational thyroid function with offspring IQ scores, assess if this association is different based on the gestati...

Phthalate exposure is associated with thyroid function during pregnancy through a novel pathway as a hCG disruptor.Objectives: hCG stimulates thyroid function in pregnancy and phthalates are known thyroid disruptors. We investigated if phthalate exposure could act as a thyroid disruptor through affecting hCG.Methods: This study was embedded in the prospective Swedish Environmental Longitudinal, Mother and child, Asthma and allergy ...

Objective: Self-reported volume of patients and specific interventions is a specific network criterion that needs to be fulfilled by reference centres that are eligible for inclusion within Endo-ERN. The aim of the present study is to evaluate how self-reported volume data in the original applications were obtained, which data are retrievable, and which set is best suitable to use for future centre evaluations. This overview is provided for two Main Thematic Groups (MTGs) of E...

Thyroid hormone has long been known as a key developmental factor in human and model species. Insufficient thyroid hormone during development can impair the growth and maturation of diverse tissue and organ systems. One of the most serious risks associated with congenital hypothyroidism is defective brain maturation and mental retardation. However, in recent years, targeted mutagenesis of the thyroid hormone receptor genes in model species has expanded our understanding of the...

Introduction: Resistance to thyroid hormone (TH) can be caused by a failure of TH to enter the cell, or by a lack of action of intracellular TH.Cases: Patient A, a 60-year-old man, presented with an elevated TSH (15.8 mU/l (reference range: 0.4–4.3 mU/l)), an elevated FT4 (29.5 pmol/l (11–25 pmol/l)), and a normal T3. Reverse T3 (rT3), the inactive metabolite of T4, was clearly elevated (0.82 nmol/l (0.14–0.34 nmol/l)). His medical history...

Background: In January 2018, the 8th edition of the AJCC/TNM staging system for differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC) was introduced in clinical practice. Studies evaluating this 8th edition so far only comprised patients with papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) or made no distinction between PTC and follicular thyroid cancer (FTC). Therefore, we evaluated the prognostic value of the AJCC/TNM 8th edition in a European population with DTC, and subsequently distinguished PTC and FTC pa...