Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: The differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC) is the most frequent endocrine malignancy with the incidence increasing worldwide. Although, DTCs are considered to be mostly indolent lesions, the proportion of patients develop metastases. Therefore, identification of molecular factors that are involved in thyroid tumour progression might help to better understand the mechanism of thyroid cancer metastasis. In the present study we examine the role of the transcription fac...

TERT promoter mutations (chr5: 1 295 228C>T e chr5: 1 295 250C>T) were recently described in thyroid tumors, with a prevalence ranging 8–25% in papillary thyroid cancer (PTC). We and others reported that these mutations strongly associate with a poor outcome in differentiated thyroid cancers. Aim of the present study was to further investigate the prognostic role of both TERT promoter (TERTMUT) and BRAF<...

Objectives: Although, almost all patients with inherited medullary thyroid carcinomas (MTC) harboured RET proto-oncogene mutation, in patients with sporadic MTC, mutations in RET are detected only in half of cases. Thus still unknown genetic causes are responsible for half of sporadic MTC and it is necessary to search for another mutations.Methods: DNAs from fresh frozen thyroid tissues of 27 sporadic MTC were extracted. The next-genera...

Introduction: The relationship between the BRAF gene mutation in papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) and the presence of lymph node metastasis (LNM) is a subject of controversy.Objective: To analyse the influence of BRAF mutation status in the characteristics of lymph nodes in patients with PTC submitted to lymph node dissection (LND).Material and methods: Lymph nodes obtained from 20 patients (12 females, mean age 50±15 y...

Introduction: Among molecular markers proposed to improve diagnosis of thyroid nodules, mutations in telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) promoter have been correlated to malignant tumors with highest recurrence and decreased patient’s survival. This suggests an important role of TERT mutational analysis in the clinical diagnosis and management of thyroid cancer patients. In this study, we investigate the potential use of core needle biopsy (CNB) for the preoperative a...

Thyroid carcinoma is the most common endocrine malignancy and represents ~1% of all types of human cancer.Objective: As the molecular pathogenesis of thyroid cancer still remains to be clarified, the goal of our study was to find new molecular markers that could improve the diagnostics, follow-up protocols, treatment outcome, prognosis and the quality of life of differentiated thyroid cancer patients.Subjects and methods: Matched t...

Background: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-protein encoding RNAs which negatively regulate gene expression. Tissue miRNA profiles may be useful to distinguish benign from malignant lesions. Recently, we have identified in the serum of a retrospective series of patients, with benign nodular goiter (n=80) and papillary thyroid cancer (PTC: n=79), two miRNAs (-190 and -95) that in combination (providing the risk of malignancy defined as pmiRNA) allow the diffe...

The oncofoetal miRNA-binding protein LIN28B plays an important role in differentiation and cancer progression. Lin28B induces epithelial-mesenchymal transition, and it is considered as a bad prognostic marker in several tumours. The aim of this work was to study the effect and regulation of LIN28B on the thyroid cancer progression process. In a first approximation a miRNA targets computational predictions were performed with miRanda algorithm and we found that among others the...