Medal winners announced from more than 150 submissions received for IES Annual Meeting

This year’s 45th Annual Meeting of the Irish Endocrine Society (IES) received more than 150 submissions for the poster and oral presentation sections of the meeting. A total of 19 oral presentations were finally selected and six invited posters were also chosen for the meeting, in addition to 131 abstracts featured in the 2021 poster virtual exhibition. In the end, the winner of the 2021 Montgomery Medal was Dr Clare Miller, St James’s Hospital, Dublin, and colleagues, for her poster presentation entitled ‘Hypoglycaemia in a metastatic gastrin secreting pancreatic NET [neuroendocrine tumour] on insulin pump therapy’.

The case presented highlighted the potential for gastrin secreting pancreatic neuroendocrine tumours to change biological activity with disease progression. The presentation noted polysecreting NET was typically associated with multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome or in rare cases an advanced sporadic disease. This was the second published case of metastatic insulinoma in a patient on insulin pump therapy, according to the authors. The 2021 O’Donovan medal was awarded to Dr Lucy Kayes and colleagues from Queen’s University Belfast for her oral presentation entitled ‘Forty years experience of neonatal thyroid stimulating hormone screening in Northern Ireland’.

Northern Ireland was one of the first participating sites in the UK national screening programme for congenital hypothyroidism (CHT) 40 years ago. Their study aimed to explore any changing patterns in incidence. Their findings revealed a significant increase in incidence (p<0.00001) in Northern Ireland. There was an increased incidence of CHT with 26 cases/100,000 livebirths in 1981 vs 71/100,000 in 2019 (p<0.00001). They added results were similar to recent Republic of Ireland data (65/100,000). The conference was organised this year by Prof Siobhán McQuaid, Department of Endocrinology, Mater Misericordiae University Hospital, Dublin. Society President Prof Brendan Kinsley formally opened the meeting and Prof James Gibney acted as Chair to the oral and poster presentation sessions.