Ricerc@Sapienza

INTRODUCTION: Males who present with a palpable testis nodule are likely to have malignant germ cell tumor in >90% of cases. Therefore radical orchiectomy remains the standard of care for intratesticular tumors. However, due to the recent developments of high-frequency probes in ultrasonography, the incidence of detecting a small non-palpable testis tumor is higher and higher. These lesions are thought to be benign in more than 60-80% of cases, thus a radical orchiectomy should be considered an overtreatment.

The thyroid hormones (THs) triiodothyronine (T3) and tetraiodothyronine,
or thyroxine (T4), not only dramatically impact on
development and differentiation, but also on the sexual and
reproductive function. There is large body of literature, in fact, on
the effects of THs on the reproductive function in both humans
(Poppe and Velkeniers, 2004; Wajner et al., 2009) and animals
(Hapon et al., 2010; Nelson et al., 2011).
For a long time the gonads were thought to be unresponsive to