Climate change, aging among topics to be highlighted at ENDO 2023
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Key takeaways:
- ENDO 2023 will take place from Thursday through Sunday in Chicago.
- This year’s conference includes plenaries on the health impacts of climate change and chronic stress and burnout in endocrinology.
Experts from across the field of endocrinology will converge on Chicago beginning Thursday for the 2023 Endocrine Society annual meeting.
ENDO 2023 will take place Thursday through Sunday at the McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago. After hosting a virtual meeting in 2021 and then a hybrid meeting with in-person and virtual elements in 2022, this year’s conference will take place in-person only for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic. Jenny A. Visser, PhD, meeting chair of ENDO 2023 and associate professor in the department of internal medicine and head of the metabolism and reproduction laboratory at Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, said the decision to move the meeting back to in-person only was based on positive feedback from those who attended last year’s annual meeting in-person.
“We know that informal interaction, and also formal interaction, of our trainees with their peers is really important,” Visser told Healio. “That is something that I also heard from my own students that personal interaction really lacked with the hybrid or online meeting. You attend the sessions; you can type in your questions. But then, afterward, if you say, ‘I really love the science of this group or this principal investigator, maybe I should do my postdoc or collaborate with this person,’ there’s a barrier when you have [a meeting] online.”
Visser emphasized the opportunity trainees and younger professionals in the field have at ENDO 2023, saying the conference gives people breaking into endocrinology an opportunity to present their research and collaborate with others. Networking events at ENDO 2023 include the all-attendee social from 6 to 7:30 p.m. CDT on Thursday and a career fair Friday from 2 to 4 p.m. CDT.
This year’s plenary sessions will cover a range of topics. The meeting will open Thursday at 8 a.m. CDT with a session on climate change. Caren Solomon, MD, MPH, of Harvard Medical School, and Jodi Sherman, MD, of Yale University, will discuss the health impacts of climate change, how health care facilities and research institutions contribute to environmental pollution and ways health care professionals can implement more sustainable practices.
“We have a responsibility,” Visser said. “By adding it to our meeting and showing that, particularly, climate change impacts endocrinology or, in general, human health, is something to keep in mind. The Endocrine Society has always been a strong advocate in raising awareness about endocrine-disrupting chemicals and they have a strong policy on that. We know that plastic pollution has an impact [on] human health and animal health as well. We also know that climate change, by raising temperatures, may have an impact on wildlife reproductive function that has been well studied, but also on human health. We have to be careful or cautious that it might also impact our own health.”
The conference will wrap up Sunday at 11:45 a.m. CDT with The Endocrine Society unveiling a new scientific statement on hormones and aging. The statement, which is currently under review for publishing in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, will examine research on age-attributed changes in the growth hormone, adrenal, ovarian, testicular and thyroid axes, as well as with osteoporosis, vitamin D, type 2 diabetes and water metabolism. A summary of the proposed statement will be presented at the session.
Other highlights in this year’s meeting include the following:
- On Friday at 8 a.m. CDT, George P. Chrousos, MD, ScD, of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens School of Medicine in Greece; and Colin P. West, MD, PhD, of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, will discuss chronic stress and burnout in endocrinology. The talk will dive into the biology of stress and burnout and how burnout in practice can have an impact on patient care.
- Cardiovascular safety for men using testosterone replacement therapy will take center stage Friday at 10:30 a.m. CDT, as findings from the TRAVERSE trial are presented. Peter J. Snyder, MD, recipient of this year’s Outstanding Clinical Investigator Award, and other experts will present data from the trial.
- Several symposiums will focus on new advances in obesity management. On Saturday at 9:45 a.m. CDT, a symposium titled “Tides are Changing for Obesity” will review some of the newest obesity medications. Another symposium Friday at 1 p.m. CDT will take a look at the role brown fat tissue plays in obesity and whether it could lead to new treatments for the disease in the future.
- The final plenary of ENDO 2023 will take place Saturday at 2 p.m. CDT and will look at the future of endocrine therapies. Insoo Hyun, PhD, of Harvard University, and Jeffrey Millman, PhD, of Washington University School of Medicine, will examine recent advances in induced pluripotent stem cells, gene editing and ethical considerations that need to be examined in the future.
“We hope to have sessions where we can show that basic scientists can learn from clinical studies, and the other way around that clinicians can learn from basic scientists and see what techniques are available that can be implemented,” Visser said. “That is a theme that, together with climate change, is running through this meeting.”
The Healio | Endocrine Today staff will provide live coverage from the ENDO annual meeting with reports on the presentations, video interviews and more. For more information on the ENDO agenda and registration, visit www.endocrine.org/meetings-and-events/endo2023.
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