Endocrine Abstracts

Objectives: The worldwide incidence of thyroid cancer (TC) is increasing at an alarming rate in the last decades and environmental pollution has been suggested to be involved in this rise. Some environmental pollutants, namely endocrine disruptive chemicals (EDCs), have been linked to endocrine system disruption, including thyroid dysfunction, and increased risk of cancer. Among EDCs, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are widely used in many industrial and consumer pr...

Objectives: Differentiated TCs are generally sensitive to first line treatments and tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs). However, part of them along with undifferentiated TC, namely Anaplastic (ATC) and Poorly Differentiated (PDTC), are aggressive and show refractoriness to tyrosine-kinase inhibitors (TKIs) treatments. A correlation between resistance to TKIs and inactivating TP53 mutations was proven in TC by our group, consistent with data obtained in other tumors. To...

Background: Several adverse events are recorded during treatment with tyrosine-kinase inhibitors (TKIs). Hypocalcemia was reported during phase III clinical trials with both Lenvatinib and Vandetanib, but scanty data are available in a real-life setting. Aim of our study was to evaluate hypocalcemia occurrence and its characteristics in a cohort of patients treated with these drugs for advanced thyroid cancer. Moreover, in patients treated with Lenvatinib, we examined a possib...

Background: Cytology is the gold standard method for the differential diagnosis of thyroid nodules, though 25−30% of them are classified as indeterminate and, in some cases, surgery is required for a definitive diagnosis. Aim: In order to reduce unnecessary thyroid surgeries, we set up a ‘thyroid risk score’ (TRS) to increase the diagnostic accuracy in a large series of patients with indeterminate cytology and to apply it to a validation ...

Recently, the G534E variant of the HABP2 gene was reported as the underlying genetic defect in large kindred with non-syndromic familial non medullary thyroid cancer (FNMTC), but these data were not confirmed in additional cohorts. Consistently, we found in our wide series of FNMTC that the HABP2G534E variant is frequent, but does not segregate with the disease. Nevertheless, a possible role for this gene in the pathogenesis of FNMTC cannot definitely ruled out also because co...

The UK newborn screening programme for congenital hypothyroidism (CH) facilitates prevention of neurodevelopmental delay in CH by enabling prompt diagnosis and treatment. Although the UK Newborn Screening Programme Centre (UKNSPC) defines a borderline bloodspot screening TSH (bsTSH) concentration as 10–20 mU/l, the lower cutoff used at Great Ormond Street Hospital (6 mU/l), enables diagnosis of true and transient CH in cases missed using UKNSPC criteria. We hypothesised t...

Context: Although unexplained conflicting results are present in the literature, most of studies report the association of BRAFV600E in papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) with a more advanced disease and with a worst prognosis. We recently demonstrated that in most of the cases PTC consists of a mixture of tumour cells with wild-type and mutant BRAF. Hence, we examined the association of percentage of BRAFV600E alleles with clinicopathologic parameters at diagnosis and disease ...

Germline activating mutations of the RET proto-oncogene are associated with inherited medullary thyroid cancer (MTC) and can be also detected in about 10% of apparently sporadic MTC cases. In the present study, 4 novel RET mutations, located in the extracellular domain (A510V, E511K and C531R) and in the intracellular juxtamembrane region (L666N), all identified by the genetic screening on sporadic MTC cases, are firstly reported and functionally characterized. RET Plasmids ca...

Fetal cells enter the maternal circulation during pregnancy and can persist in the maternal blood or tissues for decades, creating a physiological microchimerism. Since papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) is more frequent in female gender and it is the second more frequent tumor during pregnancy, the role of persisting microchimeric cells has been investigated. Tumour tissue specimens were obtained from 62 women with PTC, 41 of whom had at least one male child before the diagnosis ...

Thyroid dysgenesis accounts for 75% of all cases of congenital hypothyroidism (CH), and includes thyroid agenesis or hemiagenesis, thyroid hypoplasia, and thyroid ectopy. Thyroid transcription factors TTF-1, TTF-2 and Pax-8, which are involved in the development of the thyroid gland and its normal migration, have been indicated as the best candidate genes but have been found to be mutated in a minority of cases. Sonic Hedgehog (Shh) protein is involved in several key events du...