Endocrine Abstracts

The pituitary progenitors are responsible for generating a fully functional endocrine organ during embryonic development. They also preserve potency, to maintain the homoeostasis in the adult pituitary, being able to respond to endocrine challenges, such as pregnancy or obesity. But the main players of this complex process remain elusive. Eph-Ephrins have been implicated in an increasing number of physiological functions such as axon-guidance, eye field segregation from neural...

Background: Graves’ disease (GD) is the most common form of hyperthyroidism in Sweden. About 2000 patients are affected by GD annually (incidence 21/100 000) and a majority are women in working age. GD can be overwhelming for the affected patient. Health care professionals do their best to meet the patients’ needs, but can we do more? The aim of this study was to explore patients’ experiences of being affected by GD to improve healthcare.M...

Impaired glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity are established hallmarks of diabetes and it was speculated that also fructose tolerance could be impaired. However, investigation of fructose tolerance has been hampered by the lack of easy accessible pharmacodynamic markers. In humans, the hormone FGF21 has recently been demonstrated to be a sensitive pharmacodynamic marker responding to an oral fructose bolus and exhibiting a divergent secretion pattern in obese diabetic an...

Background and aims: High correlation is revealed between type 1 diabetes mellitus (DM1) and autoimmune thyroid pathology in children. Several candidate-genes including CTLA, PTPN, Ins-23Hphl could be associated with the combined autoimmune endocrinopathy. The aim of this study was to define whether polymorphisms of CTLA 49 A/G, PTPN22-1858 C/T, Ins-23Hphl ?/? genes contribute to DM1 and autoimmune thyroiditis (AT) combination development.Material and me...

Few large-scale multicenter data on additional immune phenomena in patients with type-1 diabetes are available. The DPV initiative aggregates standardized anonymized patient records for quality control and epidemiologic research. This report includes data on 23 837 patients with type-1 diabetes, age <30 years and at least 1 antibody measurement, from 242 specialized centers from Germany and Austria (8012 patients <12 years, 12 866 12–18 years and 2959 patients 18&...

Introduction Adipose tissue is already considered as a metabolic active endocrine organ secreting numerous substances called adipokines. A growing body of evidence links two of these adipokines- chemerin and resistin, to the pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) based on their effect on vascular function and creating an environment of low grade inflammation. Nevertheless, the exact mechanism of how these molecules act on the target cells of joint ele...

The existing follow-up studies on patients with incidentally discovered adrenal adenoma (AA) focused almost exclusively on repeat imaging and endocrine work-up on a short period.Of consecutive 152 patients with AA referred to our center from 1989 to 2003, we have assessed the risk of developing metabolic disorders and vascular complications in the 74 patients who did not underwent surgery (51 women and 23 men, median age 57, range 25–74 years) durin...

Introduction: Most thyroid neoplasms arise from follicular cells and are well differentiated. We present an interesting case of a rare first manifestation of Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma (PTC) as a cervical cystic mass, as well as the therapeutic approach.Material-method: A 29 year-old-male, without personal or family history for PTC and no history of neck radiation referred to our department because of a slow growing right lateral cervical mass in the la...

Thyroid hormones (THs) play a critical role in the regulation of growth and development in both animals and humans. They regulate metabolism primarily through actions in the brain, white fat, brown fat, skeletal muscle, liver and pancreas. Therefore, it is not surprising that since a long time scientists have been interested in measuring TH concentration in different tissues and to relate this value with possible dysfunctions. In general, TH levels are measured by immunoassay ...

Aldosterone (Aldo) plays a crucial role in heart remodeling. 1) In presence of high sodium, Aldo induces fibrosis in the cardiovascular system by still partly unknown mechanisms. Aldo-salt induces a pericoronary inflammatory phenotype, that may be one of the first events leading to fibrosis. The RALES trial has evidenced a beneficial effect of spironolactone on both mortality and morbidity in heart failure (HF), that are linked to a reduction of cardiac fibrosis. 2) In rat hea...