UNLABELLED BACKGROUND Thyroid hemiagenesis is a rare anomaly, more commonly seen on the left side (ratio 4:1) and in females (ratio 3:1). The first to describe this anomaly was Handfield Jones in 1852. CASE PRESENTATION We present a 66 year old female patient with right thyroid hemiagenesis, parathyroid adenoma on the side of hemiagenesis and parathyroid hyperplasia on the contralateral si...

THE stimulation of bone resorption by parathyroid hormone can be quantitated in tissue cultures of embryonic bone [20], using paired limb bones from a single embryo in which radioactive calcium (45Ca) has previously been incorporated. The ratio of 45Ca release from the parathyroid hormonetreated bones to that from the control bones is a sensitive measure of parathyroid effect. This technique ha...

INTRODUCTION Parathyroid crisis due to ectopic parathyroid adenomas can pose diagnostic and management challenges, since it is quite rare in clinical practice. CLINICAL FINDINGS/PATIENT CONCERNS A 67-year-old Chinese male presented as a parathyroid crisis due to an ectopic mediastinal parathyroid adenoma with his serum calcium and PTH markedly increased in short time. An ultrasonography and c...

OBJECTIVE To describe a patient presenting with the rare constellation of synchronous parathyroid carcinoma, parathyroid adenoma, and papillary thyroid carcinoma. METHODS We summarize the clinical presentation, diagnostic work-up, surgical management, and pathologic features of our patient and review the pertinent literature. RESULTS The patient was a 59-year-old man who presented with seve...

In mammals, PTH is a component in a complex signaling system involving three structurally related ligands and two G protein-coupled receptors, which share significant amino acid sequence homology (Fig. 1). PTH is a peptide hormone comprising 84 amino acids that is made by the parathyroid glands (and to a much smaller extend by the thymus) and acts through the PTH/PTH-related peptide (PTHrP) rec...

Aim of this study was to analyse contact endoscopy as an auxiliary method for identifying parathyroid glands during thyroid surgery and to identify other variables that may interfere with this correlation. Overall, 125 patients underwent thyroid surgery between January 2004 and February 2006. The variables analysed were: the total duration of surgery; time taken to locate and identify parathyro...

While there is an intimate anatomical and embryological relationship between the inferior parathyroid gland and thymus, concurrent pathology is rare. Three cases have been reported in the literature of a parathyroid adenoma in conjunction with a thymoma. We present a case report of a 60-year-old female with a past medical history of hypercalcemia subsequently found to have primary hyperparathyr...

We used RNA interference, which causes sequence-specific degradation of target mRNAs to suppress the production of parathyroid hormone by cells of patients with secondary hyperparathyroidism in vitro and in vivo. Transfection of small interfering RNA (siRNA) against human parathyroid hormone into monolayers of parathyroid cells cultured from these patients caused a dose-dependent decrease of se...

Calcitriol pulse therapy has markedly changed the management of secondary hyperparathyroidism in chronic dialysis patients. However, there are still many patients even resistant to this therapy. Our observation of parathyroid size by ultrasonography revealed that these patients usually have enlarged parathyroid glands larger than 0.5 cm3. Such large parathyroid glands are composed of nodular hy...

Ultrasonically guided fine needle aspiration of suspect parathyroid tissue to determine parathyroid hormone concentration Since the study of Arima et al,1 several reports have confirmed that enlarged parathyroid glands can be located preoperatively using ultrasound. A general problem has been the difficulty of distinguishing nodular thyroid lesions from enlarged parathyroid glands.2 3 We report...