A Look Inside the Pancreas: The “Endocrine-Exocrine Cross-talk”

Though the pancreas has traditionally been considered a combination of two separate organ systems, both the exocrine and endocrine portions are structurally and functionally interrelated. Disease processes diffusely involving the pancreas can give rise to both endocrine and exocrine dysfunctions and pancreatic diseases account for less than 0.5% of all cases of diabetes. Chronic pancreatitis and fibrocalculous pancreatic diabetes are the two most common diseases of the exocrine pancreas which can give rise to beta cell dysfunction and diabetes. On the contrary, prominent changes in the structure and functions of the exocrine pancreas have been identified in a significant number of the commonly encountered forms of diabetes, where exocrine insufficiency is unexpected otherwise. A number of hypotheses have been put forward by different workers at different time frames to explain the mechanisms of exocrine pancreatic insufficiency in patients with primary pancreatic endocrine dysfunction. Though the frequency of exocrine insufficiency seems quite high in the literature, paucity of data exists on the beneficial effect of enzyme supplementation in diabetes patients with/without exocrine abnormality. *Corresponding author: Partha Pratim Chakraborty, Department of Endocrinology & Metabolism, Institute of Post-Graduate Medical Education & Research/SSKM Hospital, 244, A.J.C Bose road, Kolkata 700020, West Bengal, India, Tel: +91 98300 92947; E-mail: [email protected],[email protected] Received January 10, 2015; Accepted February 17, 2015; Published February 25, 2015 Citation: Chakraborty PP, Chowdhury S (2015) A Look Inside the Pancreas: The “Endocrine-Exocrine Cross-talk”. Endocrinol Metab Synd 4: 160. doi: 10.4172/2161-1017.1000160 Copyright: © 2015 Chakraborty PP, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.