Endocrine Abstracts

Anaplastic thyroid cancer (ATC) is the most aggressive thyroid cancer with a median survival of about 6 months. So far, no therapies offering a survival benefit are established. Thus, new therapeutic approaches are urgently needed. In general, genetic alterations leading to ATC increase PI3K and MAPK/ERK signaling and include mutations in receptor tyrosine kinases and tumor suppressor genes. They often occur together with the loss of P53, the most prevalent mutation in human A...

Introduction: Most thyroid cancer (TC) patients have a good prognosis, but some of them show aggressive behavior and are resistant to treatment. Still no effective biomarkers are available to predict which patients will progress. Epigenetic alterations are a hallmark of cancer, and profiling DNA methylation has allowed a better understanding of the epigenetic landscape of TC and its influence in TC progression. However, bulk DNA methylomes include information not only from tum...

Innate immune cells, including macrophages, are functionally affected by thyroid hormone (TH). Macrophages can undergo phenotypical alterations, shifting between pro-inflammatory (M1) and anti-inflammatory (M2) profiles. Previous studies have established that increased TH concentrations shift macrophages into a more pro-inflammatory phenotype. Cellular TH concentrations are, in part, determined by TH transporters, cellular gateways facilitating bidirectional TH transport. An i...

Introduction: In the last decade, it has become clear that not only overt but also subclinical hypo- and hyperthyroidism are associated with several adverse clinical outcomes, including atrial fibrillation, coronary heart disease, stroke and mortality. More recently, various studies have suggested that even small differences in thyroid function within the reference range are associated with clinical consequences. Genetic factors are responsible for up to 58-71% of the variatio...

Thyroid hormones (TH) reduce liver steatosis. As steatosis is the initial step of alcoholic liver disease (ALD), we hypothesized that TH treatment could ameliorate ALD. Wildtype (WT) mice were treated with either ethanol (EtOH) or liquid control diet for 10 days followed by a single EtOH or maltose binge on day 11. In both groups, diet was supplemented with either T3 or solvent. Serum triglycerides (TG) were increased by EtOH and, surprisingly, further elevated by T3. Liver we...

Objective: Serum TSH and thyroid hormone (TH) levels are routinely used as main measures of thyroid function. While these are highly valuable markers, it is becoming more evident that under specific conditions, their predictive power for tissue TH status is limited due to the highly complex nature of tissue-specific TH signaling. This led to a high demand for human tissue TH action markers that could allow the characterization of tissue TH economy. Therefore, our goal was to d...