Second clinical congress of the gulf chapter of the american association of clinical endocrinologists, october, 23^rd-25^th 2014, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

These are the advance abstracts of the second clinical congress of the Gulf Chapter of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists to be held on 23-25 of October 2014. The declared educational objectives of the congress is to give a “state of the art in endocrine practice”. To this end, the organizing committee invited international and regional key opinion leaders to meet the objectives of the congress. We present the abstracts of the congress as submitted by the authors after minimal restyling and editing to suit the publication requirements of the journal. Many major issues and topical themes with wide interests in the profession were addressed in 5 plenary lectures. A clinical practice debate was included to highlight the pros and cons of the recently published lipid lower guidelines from both sides of the Atlantic. More focused issues were included in 12 clinical practice symposia to suite the specific educational needs of the target audience subgroups. Practical issues were addressed in “Meet the Expert”-type of interactive workshops. A selection of free communications from abstracts submitted by delegates, reflecting mostly the regional epidemiology and clinical practice in diabetes care and endocrinology, were selected for presentation as either oral or poster presentations.

We hope that by publishing them in this journal we extend the benefit to those who could not make it to the live presentations. The focus of this year's congress included bone health, molecular endocrinology, pituitary and adrenal disease, new advances in diabetes care, nuclear medicine in endocrinology and select topical issues in addition to many other day to day concerns in diabetes care and clinical endocrinology.