Endocrine Abstracts

Advances in trauma care have improved survival resulting in more severely injured individuals surviving to enter the trauma care pathway. A significant threat to recovery is now the dysregulated immune response to injury. The hyperinflammatory response of the innate immune system (SIRS), combined with immunoparesis, leads to complications such as multi-organ failure and sepsis. Moreover, recovery from trauma is significantly affected by age, which may be due to changes in the ...

Traumatic brain injury is well recognised to cause pituitary dysfunction. Although data suggests that this is uncommon after mild head injury (GCS 14–15), the consensus from a large number of papers, using different assays and methods of testing, is that 15–30% of long term survivors of TBI have pituitary dysfunction. This offers the option of medical therapy after TBI, to improve quality of life and, potentially, improve rehabilitation.In the ...

During illness changes in thyroid hormone metabolism occur, collectively known as the non-thyroidal illness syndrome (NTIS). NTIS is characterized by low serum thyroid hormone levels, while TSH and TRH expression do not increase, indicating a disturbance of the normal thyroid hormone feedback regulation.Although the common view was that NTIS results in overall downregulation of metabolism in order to save energy, recent work has shown that genes involved...