ESPE Abstracts

Nowadays, after decades of continuously rising rates of paediatric obesity across the world, insulin resistance (IR) in children and adolescents has become a prominent health issue.Obesity is recognised to be the most prevalent pathological cause of IR. However, corticosteroids or growth hormone therapy, genetic diseases and physiological conditions, such as puberty and pregnancy, may affect insulin sensitivity (IS) lifelong.Early ...

Introduction: Italy was the first EU country to be affected by COVID-19 outbreak. The sudden change in everyday life was challenging for children and young people (CYP) who rely heavily on peer connections for emotional and social support. Concerns for consequences in CYP with type 1 diabetes (T1D) rose.Objectives: To compare the diabetes-specific health-related quality of life (D-HRQOL) of CYP with T1D and their parents...

Background: Silver Russell Syndrome (SRS) is characterized by pre- and postnatal growth failure, relative macrocephaly at birth, prominent forehead, feeding difficulties and body asymmetry. The diagnosis is clinical, the genetic mechanisms involved are different, in 50% of cases loss of methylation (LOM) at the paternal H19/IGF2:IG-DMR (chr11p15.5), in 10% of cases maternal uniparental disomy of chromosome 7 (UPD(7)mat), cases of maternal uniparental ...

Background: Congenital hypopituitarism (CH) genetics is highly heterogeneous. The massive use of NGS identified at least 21 desease causing genes. Not fully understood inheritance mechanism, incomplete penetrance and variable expressivity explain the complexity of phenotype-genotype correlations. To further complicate the scenario, the co-occurence of more than one desease-causing genes variants can geopardize the phenotype. Herein, we report the heterogeneous...

Background: Heterozygous Aggrecan (Acan) mutations cause autosomal short stature (ISS) with advanced bone age, early-onset osteoarthritis and intervertebral disc disease (OMIM#165800) in humans. Cartilage matrix deficiency mouse (Acancmd) has a naturally occurring 7 bp micro-deletion in aggrecan gene. Heterozygous Acancmd mice develop postnatal dwarfism with progressing age. However, the underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms causin...

Introduction: Precocious puberty (PP) is defined as the appearance of thelarche before the age of 8 years, in girls. The gold standard for the diagnosis is represented by the increase of LH level after stimulation with native GnRH, but a feasible alternative involves the administration of GnRH analogues. This test is poorly standardised and currently literature lacks of defined values to confirm the activation of the hypothalamic-gonadal axis, since they depen...

Introduction: Septo-optic dysplasia (SOD) is an uncommon, highly heterogeneous entity of multifactorial etiology, consisting in the association of 2 or more of the following characteristics: ophthalmological abnormalities [most frequently optic nerve hypoplasia (ONH)], midline brain abnormalities [such as aplasia/hypoplasia of the septum pellucidum (SP) and/or corpus callosum (CC)] and variable degree of hypotalamo-pituitary insufficiency (HPI)<p class="ab...

Background: Gender incongruence (GI) is a topic of interest with major impacts on both the individual and society. In recent years, the small group of gender non-conforming children with an early GI history that persists through adolescence has been accompanied by a substantial rise in the proportion of adolescents reporting their gender doubts. The onset of gender dysphoria in this group is rapid. In the Czech Republic, multidisciplinary teams strive for high...

A 16-year-old boy was admitted to the Emergency Department for a painless laterocervical swelling, dysphagia and an ultrasound suspect of thyroiditis. On examination he presented facial asymmetry due to maxillary bones hypoplasia and facial nerve palsy of recent onset. There was also a history of hearing loss, hypospadias, Arnold-Chiari malformation and vertebral defects according to a clinical phenotype of Goldenhar Syndrome (GHS). Blood exams showed TSH 7.46 μU/ml (0.68-4...

Background: Idiopathic hypogonadotropic hypogonadism (IHH) is due to the failure of gonadotrofin releasing hormone (GnRH) secretion which impairs the physiological initiation of puberty. About 30 to 50% of IHH is associated to hereditary causes and about 50 mutated genes have been identified.Objective and methods: We present three intra-familial cases of normosmic IHH (nIHH) related to a new association of two hetero...