Endocrine Abstracts

There are several choices for treating esophageal cancer. But only operation is the standard therapy of papillary thyroid carcinoma with esophageal invasion. Esophageal stent and gastric fistula are chose when the patient can’t swallow because of esophageal stenosis by tumor invasion. But those put a lot of strain on the patient, and lower their quality of life. To reduce the burden on patient, it is useful to adopt targeting percutaneous ethanol injection (targeting PEI)...

Introduction: Medical therapy with dopaminergic drugs is the preferred initial treatment for symptomatic prolactinoma. However, some drawbacks of medical therapy are still of concern. Surgery is indicated in cases of resistance or intolerance to drugs or where patients prefer definitive cure to lifelong drug treatment. In addition, young women with small and enclosed type tumor may be good candidates for surgical treatment because of high curability and safety. We evaluated th...

20% of cases of FIPA have AIP gene mutations. These adenomas are often large and invasive. Our index case presented aged 13 with pituitary apoplexy. Histology showed necrotic tissue. He continued to grow and was 195 cm 4 y later. GH excess was confirmed. After treatment with octreotide and radiotherapy remission was achieved. His first cousin had also been successfully treated for acromegaly. This led to the original familial diagnosis. Subsequently, the c.910C>T, p.R304X ...

Introduction: Fracture incidence is increased during and after treatment for childhood acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL). Studies using DXA, which measures a composite of both trabecular and cortical bone mineral density (BMD), have shown reduced BMD during treatment. We therefore used peripheral quantitative computed tomography (pQCT) to investigate changes in compartmental (cortical and trabecular) volumetric BMD (vBMD) and bone geometry, and evaluated the influence of tre...

In the UK, over 95% of children age 0–16 years presenting with diabetes have type 1 diabetes. Up to 25% of these present with DKA. Many present initially to GPs and it is important that children with symptoms of diabetes are referred urgently to Paediatric Diabetes Team.Aim: We carried out a survey of the current practise of GP’s when they suspect DM in a young person. The aim was to investigate whether they recognised the need for urgent refer...

Genetic predisposition to pituitary adenomas is increasingly recognized and extends beyond diseases such as MEN1 and Carney complex to familial isolated pituitary adenomas (FIPA). A genetic predisposition occurs in >5% of all pituitary adenoma cases, with MEN1 and FIPA comprising the vast majority of these. The identification of the AIP gene as a predisposition gene for pituitary adenomas in 15–25% of FIPA kindreds and in a significant number of young patients ...

Understanding how fate choices are made by multipotent progenitors during pancreas development is valuable information in the quest for regenerative medicine and cell therapy to treat diabetes mellitus. Pancreatic differentiation is well defined and understood in rodents however, human data are comparably scarce. Specifically, when human pancreatic progenitors are multipotent is unknown as are the epigenetic changes that these cells undergo during their differentiation to beta...

Introduction: Mitotane and platinum-based chemotherapy are the main therapeutic choices for treating inoperable and/or metastatic adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC).Objective: To search for prognostic parameters of survival in patients with metastatic ACC treated with combined mitotane- and platinum-based chemotherapy.Patients: One hundred and thirty one consecutive patients with metastatic ACC treated at the Gustave-Roussy Institute (...

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is an independent government department set up to protect the public’s health and consumer interests in relation to food. The Agency has a vision of ‘safe food and healthy eating for all’.The work of a scientist, I my case a toxicologist, at the FSA is varied and requires us to develop a number of skills Eating is not risk free and it is very important for the safety of the public to assess and minimise that...

The relation between obesity and diabetes mellitus is known for long periods and this relation is based on insulin resistance. Recent studies showed that epicardial adipose tissue thickness measured by echocardiography is the marker of the visceral adipose tissue and cardiovascular risk. Visfatin is a new described adipokine and it has been showed to have mRNA expression in epicardial adipose tissue. There is a conflict about the role of visfatin on obesity, insulin resistance...