Endocrine Abstracts

The recent discovery of brown adipose tissue (BAT) in adult humans, which generates heat to maintain body temperature in a cold environment, offers an exciting new strategy to treat obesity and metabolic disease, but our knowledge of human BAT activation is limited. To identify novel pathways regulating human BAT, we undertook RNA sequencing of human brown and white adipocytes. The gene SLC6A4 (encoding the serotonin transporter SERT) was one of the most highly differ...

Background: Obesity is a complex metabolic disease characterised by excess adipose tissue, that increases the risk of comorbidities such as type II diabetes. Interventions that rearrange the gut architecture or exclude nutrients from the duodenum promote immediate and long-term anti-diabetic effects, placing the gut front and centre in obesity and diabetes pathology and treatment. Currently, little is known about the pathological changes which occur in the small intestine (SI)...

Introduction: Obesity is a global health challenge with more than 60% of the world´s population with obesity living in LMICs. Studies have demonstrated that women are more affected by obesity than men. However, the risk of obesity and obesity-related cardiometabolic diseases in women in LMICs have not been documented. The aims of this meta-analysis are: to evaluate the risk of obesity and obesity-related cardiometabolic disease in women compared to men in LMICs and to eva...

The global prevalence of obesity continues to rise, creating a growing need for new effective medicines. Selective targeting of visceral obesity (fat around the internal organs) would be particularly advantageous because it carries a greater risk for cardiometabolic diseases. The ectonucleotide pyrophosphatase (ENPP) enzyme family participates in several pathological conditions including diabetes (ENPP1, and ENPP2, also known as autotaxin) and vascular dysfunction (ENPP3-4). O...

Growing evidence implicates gut microbiota-derived metabolites in metabolic homeostasis. Gut microbial dysbiosis occurs in obesity, while high-fibre and high-protein diets, which improve glucose tolerance and induce weight loss, are associated with the generation of microbial metabolites. Understanding how the gut responds to microbial metabolites may identify mechanisms that induce satiety and improve glucoregulation, revealing novel therapeutic targets. Indole is generated f...

Objective: Motilin is a proximal small intestinal hormone with roles in gastrointestinal motility, gallbladder emptying and hunger initiation. The molecular mechanisms underlying motilin release in response to fats, bile and duodenal acidification are poorly understood, in part due a lack of suitable cellular and rodent models. We therefore generated a novel human intestinal organoid model with fluorescently labelled motilin-expressing M-cells, which we used to establish the k...