Obesity has been increasing worldwide during the last decades (,). According to the World Health Organization (WHO 2014), 17.3% of Brazilians are obese (). The diagnosis of obesity has huge consequences as this disease is associated with several comorbidities like diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular diseases and also increased mortality (). Considering the pandemic of obesity, there is a need of a simple, reliable and low-cost tool for obesity evaluation. The definition of obesity is based on the percentage of fat mass […]

Bariatric surgery offers substantial and sustained weight loss for most patients, with diabetes improvement or remission and also reduction in weight-related comorbidities in patients with a BMI of 35 kg/m2 or more. The same benefits have not yet been established for patients with a BMI of less than 35 kg/m2, since there is still limited evidence based in very few studies investigating less than one hundred patients with class I obesity. Moreover, in larger studies involving patients with higher baseline […]

A) PREANALYTICAL FACTORS Gestational age – The changes in thyroid function tests according to gestational age have been elegantly shown in a study of 13,599 nulliparous women evaluated at 1 week intervals from the 6th week to term. The study documented that TSH falls to minimal levels during the 10th week, followed by a progressive increase until term, with its value in the 10th week being half the value observed at the beginning of pregnancy. Studies on other populations (Finnish […]

In this issue of Archives of Endocrinology and Metabolism, two articles help to increase our knowledge about the connections between thyroid status and energy metabolism. Although the relation between thyroid disease with obesity and metabolic dysfunction has been well established for many decades, some of their linking mechanisms are surprisingly still poorly understood. In the first paper, a cross-sectional observational study, Ates and cols. () measured irisin levels of 37 patients with newly diagnosed hypothyroidism (and a mean TSH of […]

In this issue of Archives of Endocrinology and Metabolism (AE&M), two manuscripts address the important issue of the search for new and reliable biomarkers of kidney function and chronic kidney disease (CKD) risk in diabetes. Domingueti and cols. () evaluate the performance of several formulas of GFR estimation in regard to albuminuria classification (normo-, micro- and macroalbuminuria). In their analyses, cystatin C-based formulas showed the best performance, followed closely by the new CKD-EPI creatinine-based equation. Their findings highlight the crave […]

Obesity is presently becoming one of the great scourges in modern societies, particularly in those living in most developed countries. And even in these places, the most developed regions are particularly more affected. On the other hand, the therapeutic and nutritional procedures used to correct disturbances of nutrition, such as those due to low calorie or protein-calorie intake, which occurs in impoverished places can potentially lead to future outcomes to body weight control resulting in obesity (). Of course, the […]

The prevalence of obesity among children and adolescents has significantly risen in the past decades. An analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that 16.5% of children and teenagers are overweight (body mass index or BMI in the 85th-94th percentiles) and 21.4% are obese (BMI at or above the 95th percentile) (). Obesity in childhood has been associated with comorbidities such as hypertension, dyslipidemia and type 2 diabetes. Shashaj and cols. identified that a significant proportion […]

Various methods are available for the detection of the so-called morphometric vertebral fracture in patients who have low bone density but do not present with the classical symptoms of severe back pain due to vertebral collapse. The semiquantitative (SQ) method was developed for the purpose of correcting the subjective evaluation of radiographs and is widely used in epidemiological studies and clinical trials (). It consists of an assessment of the height of vertebral bodies at the anterior, middle and posterior […]

Classically, the normal chronological age for pubertal onset is between 8 and 13 years in girls and 9 and 14 years in boys based on data from epidemiological studies from the 60’s (). However, the age limit for pubertal timing is still a challenge (,). It is well known that puberty is a complex and multi factorial process that involves genetic, metabolic, socio economic, nutritional and ethnic factors. Moreover, the evidence that initial pubertal signs, mainly in girls, are appearing […]

Autoimmune thyroid disease (AITD) has been considered the prototypical and the most prevalent organ-specific autoimmune disorder, affecting 2% to 5% of iodine-sufficient population (). This condition encompasses a clinical-pathological spectrum of different phenotypes varying from hyperthyroidism in Graves’ disease to hypothyroidism in Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, probably representing the net effect of a complex mechanism causing break of tolerance to thyroid proteins through interaction between genetic susceptibility and environmental triggers (-). The rational for this theory is based on both family studies […]

I am very happy to become the Editor-in-Chief of our dear journal but, at the same time, I am very concerned with the responsibility of replacing the important people that preceded me since the journal started to be published by Waldemar Berardinelli. Some were professors who greatly influenced me towards becoming an Endocrinologist, such as Thales Martins, Clementino Fraga Filho, Luiz Carlos Lobo, Pedro Collet-Solberg, and João Gabriel Cordeiro. Others were references in their areas: the much-missed Armando de Aguiar […]

In December 2014, I completed a four-year period as the editor-in-chief of the Brazilian Archives of Endocrinology and Metabolism (ABE&M). I was honored and satisfied for having completed this period with the collaboration of such hardworking associated editors. I thank each one of them for their patience, for the time they dedicated to the journal, their integrity, and their critical analysis and didactics in the interface between authors and reviewers, during the flow of the manuscripts submitted to publication in […]