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Finan and colleagues report a new approach to combination therapy for the metabolic syndrome—glucagon-like peptide 1 and oestradiol linked chemically to produce a fusion molecule. Treatment with this fusion molecule results in an improvement of the metabolic profile of mice with diet-induced obesity with a minimum of oestrogenic adverse effects.
Obesity is a considerable threat to the future health of our children. Data from a large prospective cohort study have now led to the generation of a simple tool that can be used in the neonatal period to identify babies at the highest risk of developing obesity later in life. Will this tool prove useful or not?
Consensus documents are typically generated by a panel of experts that reviews data and integrates data interpretation focused on the treatment and management of patients. A novel consensus report on blood pressure targets in diabetes mellitus does this and much more by focusing on the diversity of different populations in Latin America and by tailoring approaches to blood pressure and diabetes management beyond the demographics in each subgroup.
Total thyroidectomy and subsequent radioiodine ablation improve the outcome of patients with thyroid tumours measuring >1 cm. Best practice guidelines should serve as a basis for clinical decision making in stage I thyroid cancer; however, Haymart et al. report that soft factors, unrelated to clinical presentation, affect the rate of radioiodine ablation.
A study in patients with hypertension suggests that thiazide diuretic treatment provides less cardiovascular protection in patients of normal weight than in those with obesity, whereas a calcium channel blocker is equally effective across BMI categories. Does this finding mean that body size should be the driving force in the choice of antihypertensive drug treatment?
In this Review the authors describe the hepatokines—proteins secreted from the liver that directly regulate metabolic processes. They discuss the role of hepatokines in the pathogenesis of type 2 diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular disease. Possible ways in which research in this area could be used to improve screening or in drug development are also touched upon.
Conventional clinical risk factors are currently used to assess fracture risk, but genome-wide association studies conducted in the past decade have identified genetic variants associated with fracture risk. This Review discusses the potential of integrating genetic profiling into existing risk assessment models for the individualization of fracture risk prediction.
Understanding the role of vitamin D in health and disease is an important issue in the nutritional management of children. This Review focuses on the effects of vitamin D on key disease states in children, including acute and chronic illnesses, a topic that has received minimal coverage in current guidelines.
In this Review, the authors discuss the genetics of height, including examples of rare sequence variants that can result in large effects on height and common variants with small effects on height. The key challenges in discovering further genes associated with height and the transition from gene discovery to mechanistic insights are also outlined.
Nature Reviews Endocrinologypresents a new form of article, a Viewpoint, which provides a forum for a number of researchers to discuss important ongoing issues in endocrinology. In this Viewpoint article, experts from the field of thyroid cancer discuss and offer insight into the controversy surrounding the changing trends in thyroid cancer incidence.
