ESPE Abstracts

Background: Congenital hyperinsulinism in infancy (CHI) is associated with inappropriate insulin release from β-cells. This is causally linked to defects in the ion channel genes ABCC8 and KCNJ11 regulating insulin, but little is known about the metabolic support for sustained insulin exocytosis.Objective and hypotheses: We hypothesised that inappropriate insulin release in CHI would require sustained ATP generation by enhanced mit...

Background: Congenital hypogonadotropic hypogonadism (CHH) is a group of rare disorders responsible for insufficient secretion of the pituitary gonadotropins LH and FSH. We have observed CHH in men with poorer responses to human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), or combined FSH and hCG for testicular maturation and fertility after adolescence.Objective and hypotheses: The purpose of this research is to clarify how best to tailor-make treatment according to t...

Background: A broad spectrum of human diseases including abnormalities in steroidogenesis is caused by mutations in the NADPH P450 oxidoreductase (POR). POR transfers electrons from NADPH to several small molecules, non-P450 redox partners and all microsomal cytochrome P450 proteins. POR disruption affects all partners with disastrous consequences and POR knock-out mice are embryonically lethal. A number of POR mutations and polymorphisms have been characterized from patients ...

Background: Congenital primary adrenal insufficiency (PAI) can occur as three types: isolated glucocorticoid or mineralocorticoid deficiency, or global adrenal insufficiency, with combined mineralo and glucocorticoid deficiency. Once the most frequent genes (CYP21A2, ABCD1…) have been discarded by biological tests, many other genes may be involved in each type, and one gene may be responsible of different types. Consequently, there is no real decision tree in th...

Background: The molecular diagnosis of McCune Albright syndrome (MAS) is difficult because the detection of somatic GNAS1 mutations is usually performed in blood, in which the fraction of mutated allele could be barely detectable. To improve the usual techniques (selective enrichment, either with nested PCR and enzymatic digestion or with use of peptide nucleic acid probes), and to avoid technical problems like contamination, a new approach using next generation seque...

Background: Pseudohypoaldosteronism (PHA) is a rare heterogeneous syndrome of mineralocorticoid resistance. PHA type 1 (PHA1) is characterized by neonatal salt loss, failure to thrive, dehydration and circulatory shock. It includes two forms: renal (autosomal dominant), due to mutations in mineralocorticoid receptor coding gene NR3C2, and systemic (autosomal recessive), due to mutations in subunit genes of the epithelial sodium channel (ENaC). ENaC is constituted of three subu...

Background: Neuroendocrine tumors from adrenal and extra-adrenal chromaffin cells are characterized by overproduction of catecholamines (CA), leading to the increase of urinary O-methylated metabolites (uO-Met) excretion, reliable biomarkers for the initial screening, diagnosis and monitoring of patients with pheochromocytoma and paragangliomas (PPGLs).Objective: To develop and validate a UHPLC-MS/MS method for the simul...

Diabetes mellitus is a chronic disease. The risk of microvascular complications is correlated with hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) level [1] Educating the diabetic patient to keep an HbA1c below 7% reduce the risk of long-term complications. We report the case of a 15 years old teenager, with chronical headache, referred for diabetes mellitus with a fasting glycemia of 83 mg/dl (normal < 100) and an HbA1C of 8.3% using an Ion-exchange High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC, Ad...

Background: Hyponatremia is an electrolyte disorder, that may lead to severe complications such as rhabdomyolysis, seizures, coma, and death. Clinicians do take hyponatremia seriously. However sometimes clinicians should be careful in interpreting the low laboratory sodium level as it does not necessarily reflect the actual natremic status especially when the patient is euvolemic and having normal serum osmolality, for which pseudohyponatremia should be consid...

Childhood onset of growth hormone deficiency (GHD) is a clinically heterogeneous condition and defining its cause is important for diagnostics and treatment. The most common genes implicated in the genetic etiology of growth hormone deficiency (GHD) are GH1 (MIM: 139250), encoding growth hormone (GH), and GHRHR (MIM: 139191), encoding the receptor for GHRH. GHD may also result from mutations in genes that encode transcription factors involved in pituitary dev...