Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Central diabetes insipidus (DI) is observed in up to 34% of patients undergoing pituitary surgery. Early postoperative diagnosis of DI is critical because its detection allows early treatment, reducing morbidity and hospital stay. AVP levels measurement is not commonly used to diagnose DI. As an alternative, copeptin determination has been proposed, but its usefulness has only been validated in one series.Objective: To define the threshold ...

Introduction: Recently we have demonstrated the contribution of the quantification of expression of adenohypophyseal hormone genes in the identification of the different Pituitary Neuroendocrine Tumor (PitNET) subtypes according to the 2004 WHO criteria.Aim: The aim of the present study was to evaluate the contribution of the quantification of expression of pituitary transcription factor genes to the identification of PitNETs according to 2017 WHO criter...

Rationale: A history of optic chiasm compression in patients treated for sellar tumors is associated with alterations in sleep-wake rhythm. The optic chiasm contains axons of intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs) that mediate photoentrainment of the suprachiasmatic nucleus. Compression could disrupt this entrainment leading to desynchronization with the 24-hour light-dark cycle. The post-illumination pupil response (PIPR) after blue light exposure is a u...

Context: Available data on the natural history of pituitary incidentalomas (PI) are not strong enough to draw any evidence-based conclusion on timing and length of follow up of these masses, due to heterogeneity and low sample sizes.Objective: To describe the characteristics and the natural history of PI using data from a large cohort of patients investigated in two Italian Pituitary Centers.Patients and methods: Retrospective stud...

Background: Routine clinical use of arginine-vasopressin (AVP) is limited by its small molecular size and pre-analytical errors. In contrast, copeptin – a peptide of 39 amino acids co-secreted with arginine-vasopressin (AVP) - is a stable protein and its measurement represents a reliable measure of AVP concentration. The aim of this study was to analyze diagnostic role of copeptin in diagnosis of diabetes insipidus (DI) in patients treated for hypothalamic-pituitary disea...

Context: The immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) therapy is frequently used to treat advanced cancers. Autoimmune adverse events have been reported, such as endocrine side effects including frequent thyroid disorders and more rarely hypophysitis. The aim of this study was to describe retrospectively the association thyroiditis-hypophysitis.Patients and method: From 99 patients with endocrine side effects of the ImmuCare cohort, 18 patients with hypophysiti...

Background: Pituitary tumours (PT) are generally benign, but they can rarely show an aggressive behaviour, invade surrounding structures and/or grow/recur despite multimodal treatment, making their management extremely challenging. According to the latest guidelines, temozolomide (TMZ) can be an option after failure of standard therapies in aggressive PT, while little data are available on alternative approaches such as peptide receptor radionuclide therapy (PRRT). Herein we r...

Introduction: The time, degree and mode of pituitary function deterioration in patients with PROP1 mutation is not fully known and understood.Aim: To investigate the time and mode of pituitary function deterioration in the families/sporadic patients with PROP1 mutation during longitudinal observation.Methods: We performed a retrospective longitudinal (33 years, SD=12) analysis of 22 patients (11M/11W) with PROP1 mutation, including...

Context: Osmotic stimulus or stress results in release of vasopressin. Animal studies have shown that inflammatory parameters such as interleukin-6 (IL-6) and interleukin-8 (IL-8) increase in parallel, mainly in central brain regions. Whether osmotic stimulation leads to an inflammatory response in humans is unknown. We therefore investigated the influence of osmotic stimulation on the inflammatory system in healthy volunteers.Method: In this prospective...

Context: Hyponatremia due to the syndrome of inappropriate antidiuretic hormone secretion (SIADH) is a very common condition in hospitalized patients. It is crucial to establish the cause of SIADH especially in order to exclude or detect an underlying malignancy. As SIADH can be caused by paraneoplastically produced arginine vasopressin (AVP), we hypothesized that its stable surrogate marker copeptin may be used as a diagnostic tool.Methods: We analyzed ...

The 2017 World Health Organization (WHO) classification of pituitary adenomas is based on cell lineage and transcription factors (TFs). Pituitary progenitors expressing Pit-1 are driven towards the somato-lacto-thyrotroph differentiation, T-Pit towards corticotroph, and SF-1 towards gonadotroph. We recently generated a multi-genomic classification of pituitary neuroendocrine tumors (PitNETs) (abstract submitted to ECE2019 by Neou M.). Transcriptome classification identified si...

Arginine vasopressin (AVP) is secreted via exocytosis; however, the precise molecular mechanism underlying the exocytosis of AVP is unknown. To better understand the mechanisms of AVP secretion, here we study to identify proteins that bind with a 25 kDa synaptosomal-associated protein (SNAP25), a protein that plays a crucial role in exocytosis, in the posterior pituitary. Embryonic stem (ES) cell-derived AVP neurons were established to investigate the functions of the identifi...