Cortisol secretion in obesity revisited: lower basal serum and salivary cortisol with diminished cortisol response to the low dose ACTH challenge.

Context: Some clinical resemblance may exist between obesity, particularly abdominal obesity, and Cushing's syndrome. This has stimulated ongoing interest in the role of cortisol's secretion pattern, control and metabolism in obesity.

Goals: To investigate whether basal and stimulated levels of cortisol differ between healthy people with obesity and individuals with normal weight Design: Total, free, and salivary cortisol were tested at baseline state and after 1 g ACTH stimulation in 60 healthy subjects with obesity and 54 healthy lean controls.

Sexually dimorphic oxytocin circuits drive intragroup social conflict and aggression in wild house mice.

In nature, both males and females engage in competitive aggressive interactions to resolve social conflicts, yet the behavioral principles guiding such interactions and their underlying neural mechanisms remain poorly understood. Through circuit manipulations in wild mice, we unveil oxytocin-expressing (OT) neurons in the hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus (PVN) as a neural hub governing behavior in dyadic and intragroup social conflicts, influencing the degree of behavioral sexual dimorphism. We demonstrate that OT PVN neurons are essential and sufficient in promoting aggression and dominance hierarchies, predominantly in females.

Sublingual Estradiol Offers No Apparent Advantage Over Combined Oral Estradiol and Cyproterone Acetate for Gender-Affirming Hormone Therapy of Treatment-Naive Trans Women: Results of a Prospective Pilot Study.

Purpose: Chronic gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT) with sublingual estradiol (SLE) has not been studied. We aimed to compare GAHT with SLE only, to combined oral (CO) estradiol and cyproterone acetate, in treatment-naive trans women.

Methods: Twenty-two trans women enrolled into either the CO arm or the SLE-only arm (0.