LAUSR

The Research Topic on “Endocrinology in Cancer and Aging” associated to the 7th edition of the International Congress on « Innovative therapeutics for Cancer and Ageing diseases » held in Wuhan (China) in October, 2019 generated a lot of interest with currently (June 2020) more than 22,000 views and more than 4,700 downloads of the 15 articles of this Research Topic. Two articles of the Research Topic are authoritative review articles written by international experts in their fields. Duvillié et al. report on the interplay between type 2 diabetes and pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma and insulinoma. The authors expose the complex landscape of the bidirectional interaction between diabetes and cancer that includes also obesity as a risk factor for diabetes, the influence of aging, genetic risk factors and pharmacological treatments. The authors try to consolidate the multiple interactions on the cellular and molecular level. Strous et al. focus in their review on growth hormone receptor (GHR) signaling pathways playing important roles in growth, metabolism, cancer and aging. As a cytokine receptor, GHR is regulated by signaling effectors that promote (i.e. JAK/STAT) or inhibiting (i.e. SOCS) GHR signaling as well as by ubiquitination followed by receptor proteasomal degradation, endocytosis and lysosomal degradation. The significance of GHR signaling for cancer development is demonstrated by mutations in the SOCS2-GHR axis that increases lung cancer risk as pointed out by the authors. Several original articles of this Research Topic are studying the relation between diabetes and cancer in humans. In a prospective cohort study of 37,993 cancer survivors, Tao et al. found that diabetes increases the risk of all-cause mortality among breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer survivors but not for preor post-diagnosis diabetes. In a case-control study on approximately 300 women with endometrial or ovarian cancer and a similar number of matched controls Liu et al. report that women with a history of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) or with the delivery of “large for gestational age” infants show increased the risk of developing endometrial cancer but not ovarian cancer. In contrast, the increase in risk of endometrial cancer was not observed in women with a history of preeclampsia. The authors speculate that increased placental leptin expression observed in GDM but not in preeclampsia might explain this difference. Two association studies focused on elderlies. The study of Li et al. shows an association between polymorphisms in the Apolipoprotein E (APOE) gene, an important phospholipid and cholesterol transporter, with less depressive symptoms and higher serum LDL in Chinese elderly patients with schizophrenia, and a negative correlation between depressive symptoms and LDL. The study of Roh et al. shows that high body weight variability, i.e. repeated loss and regain of weight, is associated