ESPE Abstracts

Introduction: Urinary gonadotrophins measurement is a noninvasive method for evaluation of pubertal development and may have utility in population studies.Objectives: To investigate the utility of urinary gonadotrophins as a noninvasive biomarker of puberty in boys and girls.Methods: School-based adolescent cohort study with two time points for collecting school time urine samples ...

Obesity in humans represents a cumulative retention of a tiny fraction of total energy intake as fat, which is accompanied by growth of the metabolically active, energy demanding, lean body mass. Since the energy balance regulation operates irrespective of the excess fat storage, availability of the required energy supplies is a permissive condition for obesity development. It occurs predominantly among people genetically predisposed and/or living with social or mental challen...

The differences between people in degree of obesity within a given population are attributable to a combination of differences in their genomes and in what they have been exposed to in the environment. The heritability, which indicates the proportion of the phenotypic variance that is due to the genomic variation within this given population, is often estimated to a broad range of 40-80%, dependent on methods used (family versus twin studies), and is often interpreted as defin...

Background: Short stature is one of the most common conditions referred to pediatric endocrinology clinics, and treatment with growth hormone (GH) is useful to improve height velocity and adult height, but response may be variable. Growth hormone therapy is indicated in several conditions in pediatric patients, including growth hormone deficiency (GHD) and children born short for gestational age (SGA). We investigated differences in treatment response in Indon...

Background: Somapacitan is a reversible albumin-binding growth hormone (GH) derivative developed for once-weekly administration in patients with GH deficiency (GHD). It consists of a human GH backbone, similar to endogenous human GH, with one amino acid substitution, attached to an albumin binder via a linker chain.Objective: Absorption, metabolism and excretion (AME) of somapacitan were investigated in a Phase 1 trial (...

Introduction: Of any pituitary dysfunction following brain injury, growth hormone (GH) deficiency (GHD) is the most prevalent. The cut-point for defining GHD has been placed at 7 ng/mL representing optimum test performance. We hypothesised this cut-off may be set too low for genetically taller children with acquired brain injury, notably brain tumours, who demonstrate severe growth failure but repeatedly fail to meet diagnostic thresholds for GH replacement until several centi...

Background: Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) in obese children is a diagnostic challenge. Presently recommended markers of liver steatosis and risk of progression to fibrosis are: ultrasound imaging (US) and liver aminotransferases (ALT and AST). Owing to the poor sensitivity of these tests, there is a need to search for biomarkers which could indicate early stages of NAFLD. The enhanced liver fibrosis test (ELF) based on the combination of serum concentration of hyal...

Introduction: Salivary androgens represent a non-invasive marker of puberty that may have utility in population studies as well as in the clinical arena.Objectives: To establish normal reference values of salivary androgens using LC-MS/MS and demonstrate the correlations between salivary androgens and pubertal development in boys.Methods: School-based adolescent cohort study with t...

Background: 16p11.2 microdeletion is most common chromosomal anomaly associated with syndromic obesity. The presence of a large number of flanking segmental duplications/low-copy repeat sequences with a high degree of sequence identity in the short arm of chromosome 16 (16p) leads to recurrent deletions and duplications as a consequence of non-allelic homologous recombination. A recurrent 600kb microdeletion is one of the most frequent genomic imbalances in 16...

Objective: Recent studies have suggested earlier onset of pubertal development in boys. As assessment with orchidometer tends to overestimate true testicular volume (TV), and measurements based on ultrasound (US) have been proposed as a more reliable method, we present US based references in 6-16 year-old Norwegian boys. Our results are compared with data from Europe and the United States (U.S.) in order to establish evidence for an ongoing secular trend in ma...