Endocrine Abstracts

Chemotherapy and radiotherapy can both cause ovarian failure, and radiotherapy can also damage the uterus increasing the risk of miscarriage and premature delivery. Alkylating agents are recognised to be the most gonadotoxic class of chemotherapeutic agents, but treatment regimens often involve multiple drugs complicating assessment of effect and risk. The prepubertal reproductive system is also sensitive to these effects, although age, with treatment regimen, are important de...

Chemotherapy and radiotherapy can both cause ovarian failure, and radiotherapy can also damage the uterus increasing the risk of miscarriage and premature delivery. Alkylating agents are recognised to be the most gonadotoxic class of chemotherapeutic agents, but treatment regimens often involve multiple drugs complicating assessment of effect and risk. The prepubertal reproductive system is also sensitive to these effects, although age, with treatment regimen, are important de...

Recent years have seen a dramatic rise in interest in preserving fertility in women facing treatment for cancer and other serious diseases, and fertility preservation is rapidly becoming a mainstream part of reproductive medicine. This approach, however, serves to remove oocytes or ovarian tissue before cancer treatment, rather than directly protecting the ovary itself. Some chemotherapies and radiotherapy have well known adverse effects on follicle number, although the detail...

Recent advances in the treatment of teenage cancers have led to an increasing focus on the late effects of treatment, amongst which fertility is prominent with surveys ranking potential loss of fertility as amongst the most important concerns of teenage and young adult patients. The various treatments for teenage cancer including chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery can all potentially compromise fertility with the most toxic therapies being alkylating agent based chemothera...

Fertility preservation is a rapidly advancing area of medicine. Its clinical potential in adult women was demonstrated by ovarian function and successful pregnancy following ovarian cortical tissue cyropreservation and replacement in the sheep in the 1990s with the first successful human pregnancy reported in 2004. Since then some 25 babies have been born to women who have had ovarian tissue cryopreserved and subsequently replaced, with most of these women having been treated ...

A key role of the thymic medulla is to negatively select CD4+ and CD8+ thymocytes expressing potentially autoreactive αβT-cell receptors (αβTCR), a process important for T-cell tolerance induction. It is known that tolerance induction in the thymus involves multiple processes, and the thymus medulla is also known to contribute through guiding the generation and selection of natural FoxP3+ regulatory T-cells (nT-Reg). Of the ...

We are all prisoners of our faulted personalities, but only primary psychopaths use theirs systematically to target or imprison others. They lack the capacity to empathise, something normal people develop from early childhood. Considering people as objects, psychopaths survive by preying on what seems an incomprehensible weakness of normally empathic people. The condition of primary psychopathy is linked to lifelong dystunction of the amygdala, at the brain’s emotional co...

I live in Umbria and have recently become concerned for the young couple, Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, convicted of the horrific murder in Perugia on November 1st 2007 of English student Meredith Kercher, They were supposedly acting with an Ivorian, Rudy Guede, who was tried and convicted separately.I am still haunted by a wrongful conviction half a lifetime ago, which involved the murder of 11-year old Lesley Susan Molseed. Just before Christmas ...

A wide range of reproductive functions are susceptible to adverse affects from cancer treatment. Effects on spermatogenesis are more common than deficiencies in testosterone production, but in the female the gametogenic and steroidogenic aspects of gonadal function are more intimately associated. Radiotherapy can compromise hypothalamic and pituitary function, the ability of the uterus to support a pregnancy, and erectile function. Alkylating agents are regarded as having high...

I propose to take you on a journey, which started in 2000, when I bought my first Hongshan jade carving, a reproductive piece, in Hong Kong. Since then, as my collection and my obsession have grown at very low financial cost, I have been trying to fathom out why so many ‘experts’ are completely wrong about jade, and especially Neolithic jade. This corner of collecting is truly in the dark ages, where expert opinion rules over evidence, and this is providing me with t...