OBJECTIVE Adrenocortical scintigraphy has demonstrated clinical utility in the morpho-functional characterization of adrenal tumors. The aim of this study was to identify possible relationships between the scintigraphic pattern and endocrine and/or morphological data in a series of adrenocortical carcinomas. DESIGN AND METHODS Twenty-one patients with adrenocortical carcinoma (11 nonfunctioni...

The mechanisms of tumorigenesis of adrenocortical neoplasms have not been elucidated as yet. However, loss of heterozygosity at chromosomal locus 17p has been consistently observed in adrenocortical cancer. p53 is a recessive tumor suppressor gene located on chromosome 17p. Mutations in the p53 gene play an important role in the tumorigenesis of diverse types of human neoplasms including breast...

Glucose-dependent insulinotropic peptide receptor (GIPR) and LHCGR are G-protein-coupled receptors with a wide tissue expression pattern. Aberrant expression of these receptors has rarely been demonstrated in adult sporadic adrenocortical tumors with a lack of data on pediatric tumors. We quantified the GIPR and LHCGR expression in a large cohort of 55 patients (25 children and 30 adults) with ...

Adrenocortical tumors are frequently found in the general population, and may be benign adrenocortical adenomas or malignant adrenocortical carcinomas. Unfortunately the clinical, biochemical and histopathological distinction between benign and malignant adrenocortical tumors may be difficult in the absence of widely invasive or metastatic disease, and hence attention has turned towards a searc...

Myxoid changes have been rarely reported both in adrenocortical adenomas and carcinomas. The recent observation by our group of an adrenal myxoid tumor with morphologically borderline features, but aggressive clinical behavior prompted us to review a series of 196 adrenocortical lesions, comprising 122 carcinomas and 74 adenomas, to define the morphologic, phenotypical and clinical characterist...

Low DICER1 expression was associated with poor outcome in several cancers. Recently, hot-spot DICER1 mutations were found in ovarian tumors, and TARBP2 truncating mutations in tumor cell lines with microsatellite instability. In this study, we assessed DICER1 e TRBP protein expression in 154 adult adrenocortical tumors (75 adenomas and 79 carcinomas). Expression of DICER1 and TARBP2 gene was as...

Adrenocortical tumors occur as sporadic tumors, as part of the multiple endocrine neoplasia type 1 (MEN1) syndrome or as part of other hereditary disorders. We recently cloned the MEN1 gene, a tumor-suppressor gene located on chromosome 11q13. Subsequently, we showed that sequential somatic inactivation of both alleles of the MEN1 gene contributes to the development of some sporadic endocrine n...

Background:Unilateral tumors or masses of the adrenal gland are common. They are categorized as either functional (hormone-secreting) or silent and as either benign or malignant. Adrenocortical tumors are rare in childhood, with an incidence of 0.3-0.5 cases per one million child-years. Almost half of childhood tumors are adrenocortical carcinomas (ACC). Most ACCs are sporadic, but specialy i...

Multiple endocrine neoplasia type 1 (MEN1) is an autosomal dominant disorder with neoplasia of the anterior pituitary, the parathyroid, the endocrine pancreas and other endocrine tissues including the adrenal cortex. The tumor-suppressor gene causing this disease was identified at the gene locus 11q13. We recently reported that adrenocortical carcinomas frequently show loss of heterozygosity (L...