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Forecasting the future of endocrinology in Europe

Endocrinology can be defined these days as "the branch of medicine concerned principally with the disorders of the endocrine glands, of the hormone action and its metabolic consequences" (1) or "the field of medicine involving the body's chemical messengers, or hormones and its biochemical control mechanisms, or metabolism" (2).

With this definition in mind, endocrinology is an expanding area of biomedicine, and therefore fundamental and clinical research, as well as clinical practice, will be in continuous expansion. It is acceptable that the group of medical specialties with a functional rather than an anatomical basis, such as endocrinology, immunology, oncology, etc., are going to move in that direction.

As a consequence of this functional definition, endocrinology is progressively covering complex biological phenomena and their disorders, with many chemical messengers (hormones and local factors) implicated in its biochemical or molecular control mechanisms. These multifactorial biological events include growth, sex differentiation, puberty, gonadal