Endocrine Abstracts

IntroductionDiabetes mellitus (DM) is one of the major comorbidities in patients with Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) leading to poorer outcomes. Previous evidence showed that poorly-controlled hyperglycemia increases the severity and mortality of COVID-19. Nevertheless, there is limited data on the role of in-hospital glucose control on the outcomes of elderly patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM).Objective<p class="abs...

IntroductionIn march 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic registered its first cases in Portugal, leading the government to impose lockdown, in order to prevent the spread of cases. With social isolation and outpatient activity being ceased, there was an increase in mortality of non-COVID patients. The lockdown recommendations are in contradiction with comprehensive diabetes care and reflected in less regular patient-provider interactions, which in some cases con...

Introduction: Central diabetes insipidus (CDI) occurs due to deficient secretion of arginine vasopressin (AVP) or antidiuretic hormone (ADH) by the posterior pituitary. It is a rare disease with an estimated prevalence of 1:25000. CDI can be acquired or congenital, secondary to malformation or genetics. Familial CDI (genetic inheritance) is mainly autosomal dominant. More than 80 mutations in the AVP gene have been described. In hereditary CDI, the age of onset is variable. Sy...

Proper classification of pituitary adenomas (PA) is an important area of research. Thus, developing of new biomarkers is essential to facilitate the early detection of PA, identify the drug response and predict recurrence reliably in all patients. The usual histological markers of tumor aggressiveness and/or invasiveness are often similar between recurring, regrowing, and stable tumors, and therefore are not reliable as prognostic parameters. To quantitate the levels of the HM...

Adrenal nodular disease is a frequently increasing in the general population with an incidence that reaches almost 10% in the seventh decade of life. More and more evidences show these lesions discovered through diagnostic imaging (CT, MRI) performed for other medical problems (incidentalomas). New radioimaging techniques, exploiting the quantitative variables of imaging, permit to identify an hypothetical pathological tissue. We have applied this potential in a retrospective ...

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the performance of simple and clinical/imaging-corrected unconventional indices in predicting the selectivity of adrenal vein sampling (AVS) and the lateralization of aldosterone hypersecretion in patients with primary aldosteronism (PA).Methods: Data of all consecutive patients with a proven diagnosis of PA who underwent AVS for subtype differentiation in two Italian referral centers were analyzed retrospectively....

Pasireotide is the first pituitary-directed approved therapy for Cushing’s disease (CD), effective in reducing UFC >50% in about half of patients, and with a good tolerability profile but associated with a relatively high incidence of hyperglicemia. The aim of this study was to evaluate efficacy and safety of long-term treatment with pasireotide (PAS) in patients with CD. Methods: We retrospectively evaluated 17 consecutive patients (11 females) with CD treated with P...

Rationale: Pituitary neuroendocrine tumors (PitNets) are aggressive in 20% of cases, with local invasion, relapse/scarce response to conventional treatment, in the absence of reliable predictive parameters. In 2018, Trouillas et al. proposed a 5-tier prognostic classification, not widely validated yet. In our study we evaluated the outcomes of a PitNets monocentric series in the context of this classification.Materials & Methods: We retrospe...

Background: Changes of the gut microbiota may impact on the mechanisms of immune tolerance in Graves’ disease (GD) and Graves’ orbitopathy (GO). Probiotics, which contain live micro-organisms, can modify the composition of the gut microbiota.Aims: We tested in a double-blind randomized placebo controlled trial whether the administration of a well-characterized, commercially available, probiotic would 1) modify the microbiota composition in GD/G...

Background: Differential diagnosis of ACTH-dependent hypercortisolism is crucial to indicate a proper treatment and is based on CRH-, high-dose dexamethasone suppression-test (HDDST) and pituitary MRI. However, up to 50% of cases of Cushing’s disease (CD) present a negative MRI or a visible lesion < 6 mm. In these patients, guidelines suggest to perform bilateral inferior petrosal sinus sampling (BIPSS) in order to establish a correct diagnosis. Aim of this study was ...