Endocrine Abstracts

The somatostatin analogue pasireotide is approved for the treatment of Cushing’s disease, where it achieves biochemical normalization in ~40% of patients. Predicting pasireotide resistance would help avoid unnecessary treatment. Pasireotide mediates its antisecretory action by binding to somatostatin receptor 5 (SSTR5). Almost half of corticotroph tumours carry mutations in the ubiquitin specific protease 8 (USP8) gene that encodes for a deubiquitinase. Pre...

Background: Primary aldosteronism (PA) is a secondary form of arterial hypertension that – in case of unilateral disease – can be cured by surgery. Multiple studies have shown that PA patients are at higher risk to suffer from cardiovascular events and to develop metabolic diseases. Two thirds of patients with PA suffer from obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). A bi-directional, pathophysiological interplay between OSA and PA has been proposed, with focus on overnight ro...

Context: Recent studies showed a high prevalence of anxiety and depressive symptoms in patients with primary hyperaldosteronism (PA). A cross-sectional analysis suggested only minor improvement following adrenalectomy (ADX) and mineralocorticoidreceptor antagonist (MRA) therapy.Objective: Our aim was to determine the course of anxiety and depression in untreated patients.Design: We investigated 15 patients with PA at time of diagno...

Subject: Adrenal tumours (AT) are often detected incidentally and represent a variety of differential diagnoses with variable therapeutic consequences. We have recently developed [123I]Iodometomidate ([123I]IMTO), that specifically binds to adrenal CYP11B enzymes as a SPECT tracer for adrenal scintigraphy. This radiotracer is now evaluated in patients with adrenal tumours in an ongoing clinical trial. The study was approved by the ethical committee and pa...

Objective: Hypokalemic Conn’s syndrome is a rare disease with a prevalence of 0.5% in unselected hypertensive populations. However, recent studies indicate a higher prevalence of a milder variant of Conn’s syndrome, reaching 10% in some studies. Long term outcome and health care costs of hypo- and normokalemic variants are largely unknown. The National Conn’s Registry is an initiative to create a national database of sufficient epidemiological strength to invest...

Recent studies indicating that normokaliemic primary aldosteronism (PA) is a more frequent cause of hypertension than previously expected led to an increased interest in biochemical screening strategies. We investigated biochemical diagnostic strategies used in different academic centres for patients documented in the German National Conn’s Registry. Data from 7 centres in 5 cities have been entered into a database by trained personnel. For analysis, results from 522 pati...

Objective: Primary aldosteronism (PA) is associated with vascular end organ damage. We evaluated the newly established German Conn’s Register for evidence of renal impairment and compared the data with renal function from hypertensive subjects from an epidemiologic cohort.Methods: The registry was founded in 2006 and has at present 7 participating centres in 5 locations. Data are entered in a central electronic database. Up to July 2007 555 patients...

Immunohistochemistry is commonly performed on tumour specimen obtained during transsphenoidal surgery, but its predictive value for clinical outcome is largely unknown. The aim of this study was to compare clinical and biochemical outcome characteristics after surgery with histological tumour properties. This was achieved by matching data from the German Acromegaly Register with those of the Pituitary Tumour Registry of the German pituitary working group. From 285 out of 1543 ...

This is the first prospective study to compare the efficacy and safety of medical therapy and surgery as primary therapy in acromegaly.A total of 104 patients with untreated acromegaly were enrolled. Eighty-one patients randomized to receive either octreotide LAR 20 mg (n=40) or surgery (n=41) completed the 48 weeks treatment period, and constituted the population used for this analysis, regardless of response to treatment.<p class="abs...

IntroductionIntegrins are heterodimeric transmembrane proteins composed of alpha and beta subunits that mediate cell-cell and cell-extracellular matrix (ECM) interactions. Several integrins are overexpressed in human cancers and their ECM recognition motif, arginine-glycine-aspartate (RGD), is being utilized for tumour imaging and targeting.AimTo explore the expression and function of RGD-binding integrins in...