Table 1.
Clinical characteristics.
Fig 1.
Acromegalic patients have reduced insulin sensitivity and trend for higher lipolytic activity than their controls.
A) Fasting blood glucose levels. B) Fasting insulin levels. C) HOMA-IR score from Control or Acromegaly subjects. D) ex vivo lipolysis as measured by glycerol release from excised white adipose tissue from control or acromegaly patients left untreated (Basal) or after stimulation with 30 nM isoproterenol (Iso). Data is presented as mean +/- standard error of the mean. Asterisk indicates q<0.05.
Fig 2.
Differential expression of genes in white adipose tissue from subjects with acromegaly compared to controls.
A) Heatmap of the differentially expressed genes in white adipose tissue. Individual values are colored as the log fold change for a particular gene in a particular subject compared to the average expression of that gene across all cohorts, with brown indicating less expression and green indicating more expression (designated in the key as Row Z-score). The bar across the top indicates the subject’s diagnosis, red for acromegaly and blue for controls. B) Scatterplot showing the log2 fold change for genes which had a statistically significant difference (q<0.05) between acromegaly and control subjects. Each dot represents the log2 fold change for acromegaly for a gene in the under 60 and 60 or over cohorts. The solid line represents a slope of 1, which would imply no difference in fold change between age groups. The red line is a best fit line with a lower slope, showing that on average the fold change for older patients is smaller than the fold change for the under-60 patients.
Fig 3.
GH targets are differentially expressed in acromegaly subjects.
A) mRNA Expression of A) IGF1 and B) IGFBP3 transcript levels in adipose tissue from control and acromegalic patients (C) Comparason between IGF1 mRNA and IGF-1 serum levels in patients with acromegaly (D and E) Expression of mRNA for suppressors of growth hormone signaling (F) and Expression of tyrosine phosphatases associated with growth hormone signaling. Asterisks indicate q<0.05 for the separated under 60 and 60 or over cohorts for panels A, B, D and E and for the age adjusted combined analysis for panel F. Barplots are presented as mean +/- standard error of the mean.
Fig 4.
Expression changes of selected genes, potentially responsible for lipolytic or insulin sensitivity alterations in acromegaly patients.
mRNA Expression profile of genes potentially involved in lipid catabolism (A), regulation of lipolysis (B), fatty acid synthesis (C), fatty acid desaturation (D), TCF7L2 (E), and glucocorticoid signaling (F). Asterisks indicate q<0.05. Data indicates mean +/- standard error of the mean.