Elissa S. Epel
Chronic stress can affect human health through a myriad of behavioral and biochemical pathways. Τhis review focuses on some key hormonal and metabolic pathways that appear important today. In modern society, we are faced with excessive psychological stress, as well as an epidemic of overeating, and the two together appear to have synergistic effects …
Leonidas H. Duntas
Internationally renowned Endocrinologist, Professor Aldo Pinchera, an exceptional personality and brilliant scientist, passed away on 11 October, 2012. The news of his passing was received with deep sorrow and a profound sense of loss …
Paulina A. Essah, Kai I. Cheang, John E. Nestler
The polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is characterized by chronic anovulation and hyperandrogenism, and is the most common cause of anovulatory infertility in developed countries1,2. Affected women suffer not only from infertility, but also from a high rate of early pregnancy loss, defined as miscarriage during the first trimester …
Polyzois Makras, Socrates E. Papapoulos
Hypercalcaemia results from the failure of renal calcium excretion to compensate increased influx of calcium into the circulation from the intestine, the kidneys and the skeleton. Hypercalcaemia is a common metabolic abnormality of varying severity …
Florian Lang, Christos Stournaras
Serum-and-glucocorticoid-inducible-kinase-1 (SGK1) is under regulation of several hormones, mediators and cell stressors. More specifically, SGK1 expression is particularly sensitive to glucocorticoids, mineralocorticoids, and TGFβ. Moreover, SGK1 expression is exquisitely sensitive to hypertonicity, hyperglycemia, and ischemia …
Constantin Polychronakos
For the past several decades, the standard diagnostic and clinical research tool in endocrinology has been the hormone assay. The enormous surge in the development and use of molecular and cell biology technologies in the past two decades has advanced our understanding of hormone synthesis, secretion, regulation and action at the cellular level but had a relatively modest impact on the exploration of hormonal physiology …
Panagiotis Anagnostis, Asterios Karagiannis, Konstantinos Tziomalos, Anna I. Kakafika, Vasilios G. Athyros, Dimitri P. Mikhailidis
The widespread application of abdominal imaging procedures has resulted in an increased frequency of clinically silent adrenal masses. Adrenal incidentaloma (AI) is a term applied to an accidentally discovered adrenal mass on imaging performed for the investigation of an unrelated complaint …
Demosthenes B. Panagiotakos
Based on statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO), the proportion of people over the age of 60 years is growing faster than any other age-group and, in many countries, it is the fastest growing segment of the population …
Mubarak Al-Gahtany, Eva Horvath, Kalman Kovacs
Pituitary hyperplasia is rare, difficult to diagnose and sometimes controversial. The hyperplasia could be physiologic which is usually reversible, or pathologic which varies in presentation from incidental to tumor like lesion with and without hormonal disturbance. Any pituitary cell is capable of undergoing hyperplasia in the presence of the right stimuli …
Amos Pines
A dramatic change has occurred over the past decade with regard to the use of hormones during the postmenopausal period. In the 90’s, the belief in the USA being that there was reason to recommend hormone therapy (HT) for the prevention of coronary artery disease, the guidelines of the American College of Physicians in 1992 were as follows …
Eirini Lioudaki, Niki G. Mavroeidi, Dimitri P. Mikhailidis, Emmanouel S. Ganotakis
Subclinical hypothyroidism (SCH), defined as elevated serum thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) in the presence of normal circulating free thyroxine (FT4) and triiodothyronine (T3), is a relatively common condition. Replacement treatment with levothyroxine is justified only for individuals with TSH levels >10 mIU/l …
Edward M. Brown
The system that regulates extracellular calcium (Ca2+o) homeostasis maintains a nearly constant level of Ca2+o so as to ensure the availability of calcium for its numerous intra- and extracellular roles. The molecular cloning and characterization of a G protein-coupled, Ca2+o-sensing receptor has elucidated the mechanism through which parathyroid cells …
Martin O. Savage, Helen L. Storr, Ashley B. Grossman, Gerasimos E. Krassas
Although paediatric Cushing’s disease is rare, it is associated with severe morbidity in childhood and presents a major diagnostic and therapeutic challenge for the paediatric endocrinologist. Growth failure remains an important feature of paediatric Cushing’s disease, both at diagnosis and after successful treatment. However, the development of specific diagnostic tests and important therapeutic advances has contributed …
Catherine Dacou-Voutetakis
The realization that the environment exerts a favorable or unfavorable effect on the human organism is not new. In the remote past, not only physicians but philosophers (e.g. Plato, Aristotle) as well wrote about the adverse effects of a maltreated environment, while Theophrastus (a student of Plato and Aristotle) is considered the father of ecology …
Poupak Fallahi, Silvia Martina Ferrari, Dilia Giuggioli, Andreina Manfredi, Caterina Mancusi, Silvia Fabiani, Marco Centanni, Santino Marchi, Clodoveo Ferri, Alessandro Antonelli
OBJECTIVE: The prevalence and clinical features of thyroid involvement in patients with hepatitis C virus-associated mixed cryoglobulinemia (MC+HCV) have been reviewed. DESIGN: A PubMed Medline search was conducted through December 2011 to identify all studies that reported thyroid involvement …
Gerasimos P. Sykiotis, Athanasios G. Papavassiliou
Nuclear receptors are ligand-regulated transcription factors that evolved from an ancestral orphan receptor into a highly diverse family present throughout the entire animal kingdom. They encompass receptors for steroid and non-steroid hormones, vitamins and metabolic intermediates. These receptors signal through endocrine, paracrine, autocrine and intracrine networks …
Gerasimos P. Sykiotis, Panagiotis A. Konstantinopoulos, Athanasios G. Papavassiliou
The biomedical sciences are currently in transition between the bloom of fundamental knowledge and the fruition of specialized clinical application.1 Following the success of the Human Genome Project, the roadmap is now in place for the description of physiology and illness in molecular terms…
Leonard Wartofsky
Thyroid cancer is the most common endocrine malignancy with more deaths annually than all other endocrine cancers combined. Medical centers in many parts of the world have noted an increasing frequency of cases of thyroid cancer. The general impression has been that if there is a rising frequency, it was likely due to some environmental cause …
Chittari Venkata Harinarayan
The vitamin D endocrine system in now recognized as subserving a wide range of fundamental biological functions in cell differentiation, inhibition of cell growth as well as immunomodulation. Both forms of immunity, namely adaptive and innate, are regulated by 1,25(OH)2D3. The immune-modulatory properties of vitamin D suggest …
Achille Gravanis, Antonis Makrigiannakis, Ekaterini Chatzaki, Emmanuel Zoumakis, Christos Tsatsanis, Andrew N. Margioris
Human endometrium exhibits characteristics of a neuroendocrine-like stress organ in addition to its classical role as the main target of ovarian steroid hormones. Indeed, the epithelial cells of human endometrium express the stress-associated neuropeptide genes corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), proopiomelanocortin, proenkephalin and prodynorphin…
Richard Fleming
Insulin resistance is an important “upstream” driver for reproductive and metabolic abnormalities in women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS). This theoretical background is now supported by substantial evidence for treating women with PCOS with insulin sensitising agents such as metformin or the thiazolidinediones…
Derek V. Henley, Kenneth S. Korach
A large number of natural and synthetic chemicals have been identified that are reported to disrupt the normal functioning of the endocrine system and produce untoward effects in hormone-responsive target tissues and organs in both humans and animals. These chemicals are broadly referred to as endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) and consist of numerous physically …
Atieh Amouzegar, Ladan Mehran, Farzaneh Sarvghadi, Hossein Delshad, Fereidoun Azizi, John H. Lazarus
Thyroid hormones play a critical role in neurodevelopment both during pregnancy and postnatally. The fetal thyroid produces sufficient amounts of thyroid hormones just after 16 weeks of pregnancy prior to which the fetus is totally dependent on maternal FT4 for its physical and neural development …
Vera Popovic, Felipe F. Casanueva
Recent data suggest that in addition to leptin’s role in conveying signals of the amount of energy stores to the central nervous system, this adipocyte secreted hormone interacts with the endocrine system to provide critical information about the size of fat stores, acting as a permissive factor that allows the triggering of energy demanding situations …
Polyzois Makras, Georgios Toloumis, Dimitrios Papadogias, Gregory A. Kaltsas, Michael Besser
Cushing’s syndrome (CS) is a physically and psychologically disabling disease associated with high morbidity resulting from inappropriate elevation of circulating free cortisol levels. The main features of CS are disturbance of the normal circadian rhythm of cortisol secretion, impairment of the normal feedback of the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA)-axis …