Endocrine Abstracts

SARS-CoV-2 has rapidly spread from China throughout the world leading to a pandemic. COVID-19 can be severe enough to cause hospitalization and death. Many patients with endocrine disorders share many of the recognized risk factors for severe disease and have potential additional risks due to corticosteroid replacement therapy or alteration in blood electrolytes. We here report three cases of COVID-19 in patients with post-surgical hypopituitarism and documented hypocortisolem...

Background: Subclinical Cushing’s syndrome (SCS) is defined as alterations in hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis without classic signs or symptoms of glucocorticoid excess. This condition has been associated to increased risk of adverse metabolic and cardiovascular outcomes, independently of other potential risk factors. However, is still not known if this condition could lead to a higher mortality respect to non-secreting adrenal masses (NSA).<p class="abs...

Increasing evidences indicate that brown adipose tissue (BAT) functional activity is reduced during obesity. The nature of this deficit in BAT function, however, is still poorly understood. To analyze whether insulin function in the BAT is altered during obesity, we studied the in vivo metabolic activity of BAT by PET/CT imaging and euglycaemic hyperinsulinemic clamp in lean and diet-induced obese mice. Three groups of mice were analyzed after administration of different diet ...

The aim of this epidemiologic study, performed in a wide population of high-school students in Northern Italy, was to obtain an unbiased estimate of the prevalence of hyperandrogenic states in adolescents and young females.2052 female students, aged 15–19 years, were consecutively contacted. 939/2052 (45.8%) refused to participate in the study, but 431 of the 939 non-participants (45.9%) agreed to fill out a brief questionnaire aimed to broadly asse...

Introduction: Within the high prevalence of male infertility there is the rare 45,X/46,XY mosaicism, associated or not with hypogonadism. The phenotypes of this genetical disorder present with a wide variability ranging from Turner stigmata to apparent normal male.Case report: Two men who presented with azoospermia in the context of couple infertility were subsequently found to be affected by 45,X/46,XY mosaicism. Physical examination revealed a complete...

Background and aim: Epicardial fat (EF) is a metabolically active organ as well as visceral fat (VF). EF has been recognized as a potential additional marker of cardiac risk in obesity and type 2 diabetes. This study wants to assess the relation between EF and VF and the correlation with nutritional and hormonal parameters.Material and Methods: Fifty-nine overweight/obese women were enrolled in the study. All women underwent anthropometric measurements, ...

Aim: This study was aimed to estimate the nutritional status and the prevalence of weight excess in a wide unselected population of adolescent and young students from Emilia Romagna.Material and methods: Three thousand and ninety-one high school students, aged 15–19 years were consecutively contacted. One thousand eight hundred sixty out of 3091 (60.2%) accepted to participate in an epidemiologic study, whose procedures included anthropometric measu...

Congenital morphological alteration of pituitary gland is a rare disease often associated with isolated or multiple hormonal deficiency. So far only few genes have been shown to be implicated in a small number of these cases.Aim of this study was to evaluate putative genetic alteration by an array-based comparative genomic hybridization (array-CGH) in 19 adulthood patients, 16 males and 3 females, affected by congenital morphological alteration of the pi...

Brown adipose tissue (BAT) is an insulin sensitive organ having a very high uptake of glucose per gram of tissue. The role of insulin on glucose uptake in BAT is still poorly understood, moreover, it is not clear whether BAT insulin function is compromised with obesity. We used a small animal PET/CT imaging approach to analyse insulin function in vivo in lean and obese mice using a glucose analogue PET tracer (18F-FDG). Three groups of mice were analysed afte...

Aims: SC can be discovered in 5–20% of the incidentalomas. Subclinical secretion is defined by the failure to suppress plasma cortisol after 1 mg-overnight dexamethasone <50 nmol/l, but there is no agreement in literature. The aim of our study was to evaluate cortisol response to oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) as potential marker of autonomous activity of these adenomas.Methods: Ninety subjects, 47 females and 43 males, underwent the protoco...