Hormone, Diabetes and Metabolism Terms

Sugar left circulating rather than delivered into cells, a shortfall that quietly damages small and large blood vessels over years.

It changes nothing about wanting a drink, only what happens afterward, and that consequence is the entire mechanism.

One drug licensed across mood and pain, duloxetine works partly through spinal cord pathways that damp pain signals before they reach the brain.

Signals released straight into the bloodstream reach every tissue, so a gland the size of a pea can change what the whole body does.

Cancer that occurs in endocrine tissue, the tissue in the body that secretes hormones.

A pancreatic cell that produces hormones (e.g., insulin and glucagon) that are secreted into the bloodstream.

Ductless glands drop their messengers straight into the blood, so a signal made in one place acts on organs far away.

A tumor that is found in endocrine tissue but does not make extra hormones.

Hormones travel everywhere, so this specialty is defined by the messenger rather than by a single organ or region of the body.

A drug that blocks the hormone endothelin and may prevent prostate cancer from spreading to the bones.

The most common receptor result in breast cancer, and the one that opens the door to hormone-blocking treatment taken over years.

A negative result narrows the options rather than worsening them outright, and it is the first of the three markers behind the triple-negative label.

ERT supplies estrogen to postmenopausal women or those without ovaries, and is distinguished from combined regimens that also include progesterone.

A form of estrogen that may have fewer side effects than other forms.

A blood estradiol result means little without knowing where in the cycle, or where in life, the sample was taken.

A combination of the hormone estradiol (an estrogen) and nitrogen mustard (an anticancer drug).

After menopause the ovaries largely stop making it, and fat tissue converting adrenal hormones becomes the main remaining source.

A loose label stretched across two unrelated drug strategies: occupying the receptor, or shutting off the supply of the hormone upstream.

A hormone receptor that works as a gene switch, so blocking it changes what a cell builds rather than merely what it senses.

Describes cells that do not have a protein to which the hormone estrogen will bind.