Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Somatostatin analogues (SSA) represent the main therapeutic option in patients affected with functioning well-differentiated neuroendocrine tumors (NET). However, after a variable time from the start of the therapy tachyphylaxys may cause lack of control of clinical syndrome and progression of the disease.Aim: The aim of this preliminary study was to evaluate efficacy in terms of reduction of circulating markers, control of the clinical syn...

Introduction: Pasireotide is the first pituitary-directed drug approved for Cushing’s disease (CD). We report our 10-years experience with pasireotide in CD reviewing and analysing data about all the patients treated with pasireotide at our referral centre both in randomised trials and in clinical practice.Patients and methods: Twenty active CD patients were treated. Fourteen patients were treated with pasireotide in randomised trials and six patien...

Dopamine receptors was suggested to be expressed in medullary thyroid cancer (MTC). The aim of the current study was to evaluate the expression of D2 dopamine receptor in MTC and the effectiveness of the dopamine agonist cabergoline in patients with MTC. Five paraffin-embedded cases of MTC obtained after thyroidectomy were used to evaluate D2 receptor expression by immunohistochemistry. Fifteen patients (7 males, 8 females, 36–78 years) with post-sur...

Surgical treatment is the first therapeutic option in patients affected with medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC). However, cure-rates are often low due to the high frequency of loco-regional metastases and recurrences. Therefore, post-operative hyper-calcitoninemia is a common feature in CMT. Despite these findings, traditional imaging techniques are often unable to localize tumour foci. In the last years the availability of new morpho-functional techniques might offer new chanc...

Introduction: To date, two pharmacogenetic studies investigated the effect of the common exon 3 deletion of GH receptor (d3-GHR) variant in small series of acromegalic patients treated with Pegvisomant (Peg), suggesting an association of d3-GHR allele with better response to Peg.Aim: To assess the influence of d3-GHR variant in a large cohort of acromegalics with active disease and resistance to somatostatin analogues (SSA) treated with either Peg monoth...