Endocrine Abstracts

Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is a rare and heterogeneous malignancy with incompletely understood pathogenesis and poor prognosis. Recent data from the German ACC Registry (n=377) demonstrate an overall 5-year survival of 46%. Survival is clearly stage-dependent (P<0.01) with a 5-year survival of 85% in stage 1, 56% in stage 2, 42% in stage 3, and 16% in stage 4, respectively.In stages I –III open surgery by an expert surgeon aimi...

The Estrogen Receptor (ER) is a well-studied, ligand dependent transcription factor. We have analysed, by kinetic chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) assays, the mechanisms by which the ER modulates the permissiveness and transcriptional activity of the PS2 gene. Sequential ChIP assays were used to define the cyclical association of approximately 50 different proteins to the pS2 promoter. Key results from these studies are (i) that unliganded and liganded ER direct cycling on...

Introduction Retrospective analyses suggest that patients with adrenal insufficiency (AI) have an increased risk for cardiovascular diseases which was mainly attributed to non-physiological cortisol profiles and/or supraphysiological replacement doses.Material and methodsWe analyzed the 24-hour blood pressure (BP) profiles in patients with primary (PAI) and secondary (SAI) AI. BP threshold criteria for hypert...

Introduction: Retrospective analyses suggest an increased risk for cardiovascular diseases in patients with adrenal insufficiency (AI), mainly due to supraphysiological replacement doses.Objective: To evaluate the 24-hour blood pressure (BP) profile in patients with primary (PAI) and secondary (SAI) AI.Material and methods: BP threshold criteria for hypertension and dipping status of the 2018 ESC/ESH guidelines were used (24-h: &#8...

Background: Ischemic heart disease (IHD) is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Thus, there is the necessity to find new therapeutic approaches. Thyroid hormones (TH) have a major impact on cardiac function and even appear to improve the outcome after acute ischemia/reperfusion and in chronic heart failure. Still, TH signaling within the heart is not yet completely understood.Aim: This project aims to investigate the influence of TH receptor al...

Background: Recent guidelines recommend lobectomy (LOB) when compared to total thyroidectomy (TTX) as the preferred approach for patients with low-risk differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC). Major advantages are the avoidance of lifelong hormone replacement therapy and the absence of any risk for contralateral recurrent laryngeal nerve palsy and postoperative hypoparathyroidism with no or minimal increased risk for adverse oncological outcomes. However, this limited approached s...

Introduction: Glucocorticoid (GC) replacement regimens in adrenal insufficiency (AI) only roughly correspond to physiological steroid profiles. Moreover, control of substitution quality is difficult and signs of clinically relevant mild chronic over- or under-replacement might be omitted. FKBP5 regulates GC receptor sensitivity by reducing its affinity to cortisol when bound to the receptor complex. FKBP5 methylation has been inversely correlated with cortisol levels both in h...

Ischemic heart disease (IHD) is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. TH have impact on cardiac function and even appear to improve outcome after acute ischemia/reperfusion and in chronic heart failure. This project aims to investigate the influence of TH receptor alpha (TRα) on IHD using specific mouse models to assess the contribution of canonical vs. non-canonical TH signaling. Mice underwent permanent ligation of the left descending coronary artery and were tr...

Background: Focused parathyroidectomy has become the standard procedure for patients with sporadic primary hyperparathyroidism (pHPT) fulfilling the criteria for surgical therapy and requires preoperative localization procedures. Ultrasound imaging (US) and 99mTc-sestamibi-scintigraphy with/without SPECT/CT (SC) are established first line procedures. 18F-choline PET/CT (PET) has emerged as a novel sensitive and specific method. However, current reimbursem...

Corticotrophin-releasing hormone (CRH) stimulation test is used in the differential diagnosis of Cushing’s syndrome. Cushing’s disease tumours carry somatic driver activating mutations in the ubiquitin-specific-protease 8 (USP8) gene in almost half of the cases. The aim of the present study was to examine whether the USP8 mutational status in Cushing’s disease tumours influences the response to the CRH stimulation test. We did a monocentric, re...