Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: The long pentraxine-3 (PTX3) is a key component of humoral innate immunity that is expressed in various cell types during stress and tissue injury. PTX3 also acts like an oncosuppressor regulating tumor-promoting inflammation and it is implicated in tissue repair and autoimmunity. Autoimmune disease, tissue remodelling and oncogenesis often coexist in the thyroid. PTX3 role in thyroid disease is still unknown. Aim of the study is to evaluate if plasmatic levels o...

We have already reported that synthetic analogs of 3-iodothyronamine (T1AM), a naturally occurring thyroid hormone derivative, share a pleiotropic activity with the endogenous parent compound, including autophagic flux promotion (ATG), neuroprotection, and metabolic reprogramming. Our study aimed to determine whether the T1AM lead analog SG2 and its derivatives SG22 and SG23, developed as prodrugs of SG2, can protect human glioblastoma U87 MG cells from the toxic effects induc...

Thyroid hormone receptors (TRs) modulate various physiological functions in many organs. The conservation of TRα and TRβ isoforms during evolution of vertebrates suggests different roles for these TRs in thyroid hormone-dependent regulation of gene expression. TRα and TRβ are widely distributed and overlapping in several tissues, and their functional divergence is mainly attributed to their variable tissue expression patterns and intrinsic properties of spe...

Background and Aim: Altered hepatic thyroid hormone (TH) signalling is associated with the onset and progression of liver diseases. Local hepatic hypothyroidism is related to a higher incidence of developing non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NASH) in humans and animal models. Thyroid hormone treatment proved to be a promising therapy, slowing the progression of NAFLD to non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), a more advanced stage of the disease characterized by inflammation an...

Recently, human cerebral organoids (hCOs) emerged as powerful three-dimensional in vitro models recapitulating key aspects of early human cerebral cortex development. Improved protocols for hCO generation from induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC) paved the way for new disease modeling approaches and enable multimodal analyses of perturbed neurogenesis resulting from manipulation of signaling pathways or gene function. These prospects prompted us to adopt this techno...

The ability of thyroid hormones to regulate body temperature is well established. While the active hormone T3 can act peripherally to induce thermogenesis in fat and muscle, it also acts centrally in the brain to increase body temperature through the sympathetic nervous system. Most remarkably, recent studies show that T3 treatment in mice causes an elevated body temperature even at 10°C, far below thermoneutrality, suggesting that the T3 effect constitutes pyrexia rather...

FAM83B has been recently identified as an oncogene involved in the development and progression of several malignancies, but its role in thyroid cancers (TC) is still unclear. In the present study, we examined the expression of FAM83B and its possible involvement in cell migration and differentiation, in neoplastic and normal thyroid tissues and in TC human cell lines. We found that FAM83B expression in TC varies according to tumor histotype, being si...

Background: Resistance to thyroid hormone (TH) beta (RTHβ), caused by mutations in THRB, is characterized by elevated serum (F)T4 accompanied by non-suppressed TSH concentrations. Disease features arise from variable resistance to TH action in tissues expressing Thyroid Hormone Receptor (TR) β (hypothalamus, pituitary, liver) and from thyrotoxic effects in tissues expressing TRα (heart, bone, brain). In symptomatic patients, treatment mainly involves be...

The endogenous thyroid hormone derivative 3-iodothyronamine (T1AM), and its metabolite 3-iodothyroacetic acid (TA1) are known to stimulate learning and induce hyperalgesia in mice. Recently, it has been demonstrated that exogenous T1AM is able to rescue synaptic impairment after transient ischemia in the entorhinal cortex (EC), a brain area crucially involved in learning and memory, and early affected during Alzheimer’s disease. However, i...

The quantification of TSH from a serum or plasma sample constitutes the cornerstone of assessing the thyroid axis in the clinical routine. In addition, T4 and/or T3 levels may be determined to diagnose pathological conditions. However, these data do not necessarily reflect the local action of thyroid hormone in the target tissues and are sensitive to distortion, as best known from pregnancy when chorionic gonadotropin disturbs the regular feedback control. Recently, we identif...