Endocrine Abstracts

Background: The adrenolytic agent mitotane is widely used in the adjuvant treatment of adrenocortical cancer, but its mechanism of action including potential effects on mRNA expression is poorly elucidated.Objective: To examine mitotane-induced mRNA expression changes in the H295R adrenocortical cancer cell line.Methods: Various concentrations of mitotane in different treatment periods (24–120 h) have been tested in cell viabi...

Background: Midnight salivary cortisol (SalC2400) measurement has been recently suggested as one of the first-line screening tests for hypercortisolism.Aims: In our present study, we evaluated the clinical utility of the salivary cortisol (SalC) measurement in the diagnosis of both overt and subclinical Cushing’s syndrome.Patients and methods: Patients with overt Cushing’s syndrome (n=23, group A) and those with su...

Introduction: The hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis setpoint and the glucocorticoid sensitivity in various tissues are at least partly genetically determined. The glucocorticoid receptor (GR) gene polymorphisms may have an impact on the development and/or the variability of clinical manifestations of endogenous hypercortisolism, however their role has not been investigated in patients with endogenous hypercortisolism.Methods: We investigated ...

Decreased bone mineral density (BMD) and disturbances in glucose metabolism are common complications of Cushing’s disease. Many recent studies have shown that hyperinsulinemia in type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM) may lead to higher BMD as compared to healthy individuals. The aim of the present study was to investigate the possible relationships between BMD, serum markers of bone metabolism and plasma cortisol concentrations. The second objective was to determine whether the p...

Many previous studies have shown decreased bone mineral density (BMD) in patients with endogenous hypercortisolism, although data on the severity of bone disease are contradictory. There are very sparse data about the correlations between plasma cortisol concentrations and BMD.The study included 188 patients with clinically inactive adrenal adenomas (IAA) and 30 patients with ACTH-independent Cushing’s syndrome (CS) due to adrenocortical adenomas. A...

Background: Adrenal myelolipoma (AML) is a relatively common and invariably benign tumor composed of adipose tissue and hematopoietic elements. Due to the variable proportion of fat and hematopoietic elements, it is sometimes challenging to differentiate AML from adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC). MicroRNAs have been identified as promising biomarkers in many tumors, including adrenocortical neoplasms, but the microRNA expression of adrenal myelolipoma has not been investigated, ...

Introduction: Pheochromocytomas and paragangliomas (Pheo/PGL) are rare neuroendocrine tumours arising from the adrenal medulla or the symphathetic paraganglia, respectively. Germline mutations are present in ~40% of the patients. To date, at least 16 genes have been demonstrated to be involved in the genetic background of Pheo/PGL. Prioritization in order of genes tested can be applied, but if the probability of a disease-associated germline mutation exceeds 10% the testing of...

Introduction: Disrupted mitochondrial functions and genetic variations of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) have been observed in different tumors. Regarding pituitary adenomas mtDNA was evaluated only in oncocytic type using PCR based methods and it showed high prevalence of Complex I variants. Next generation sequencing (NGS) allows high throughput sequencing and it is useful for accurate identification of heteroplasmy of mitochondrial genome as well.Aim: We a...

Background: In our previous works the interdependence of DNA demethylation with proliferation and differentiation of pituitary neuroendocrine tumours (PitNET) and the inhibitory effect of Aspirin on pituitary cell proliferation were demonstrated. Although the role of Aspirin in epigenetic regulation was described in other malignancies, its correlation with pituitary tumorigenesis is currently unknown.Our objective: was to investigate the genomic and epig...

Introduction: The capability of cancer to accommodate to special metabolic circumstances is a hallmark of it’s existence. Pheochromocytoma/paragangliomas (Pheo/PGL) are rare neuroendocrine tumors with strong and specific metabolic phenotype due to mutations of genes encoding succinate dehydrogenase (SDH) subunits. In this study our aim was to evaluate the expression of glutaminase-1 in hereditary Pheo/PGL tissues and to inhibit SDH activity via pharmacological treatments ...