Pituitary tumors are benign adenomas that are quite common. In young and middle-aged women, the first thing you should think about is a tumor in your pituitary gland when you have symptoms such as sudden blurred vision, amenorrhea, and acromegaly. The pituitary gland is an important endocrine organ, containing several kinds of endocrine cells that secrete a variety of endocrine hormones. If an endocrine cell grows adenoma, special clinical manifestations may occur.
Clinical manifestations: 1. Common endocrine manifestations of pituitary adenoma 1. Growth hormone cell adenoma: The early tumor is only a few millimeters in size and mainly shows excessive secretion of growth hormone. In adolescent patients, excessive growth may occur and even develop into giants. As an adult, the tumor may become hypertrophy of the extremities. In severe cases, the patient may feel general weakness, headache and arthralgia, hypogonadism, amenorrhea and infertility, and even complications of diabetes.
2. Prolactin cell adenoma: The main manifestations are amenorrhea, overflow of milk, infertility, loss of axillary hair, pale and delicate skin, increased subcutaneous fat, and weakness, fatigue, drowsiness, headache, and sexual dysfunction. In men, the symptoms are decreased libido, impotence, breast enlargement, beard thinning, atrophy of reproductive organs, decreased sperm count and infertility.
Adrenocorticotropic adenoma: clinical manifestations are centripetal obesity, full-moon face, buffalo back, polycythemia, purple lines on the skin of abdomen and thighs. In severe cases, amenorrhea, loss of libido, general weakness, and even bedridden. Some patients also have hypertension and diabetes.
4. Endocrine inactive adenoma: In the early stage, the patient has no special feeling that the tumor grows up and can compress the pituitary gland to cause clinical manifestations of pituitary insufficiency.
Other manifestations of pituitary tumor are related to the patient’s gender, age, tumor size and expansion direction, etc. 1. Malignant pituitary tumor: short history, fast progression, not only the tumor grows to compress the pituitary tissue, but also invades to the surrounding area, causing the destruction of saddle base bone or infiltrating into the cavernous sinus, causing actinic nerve palsy or abducens nerve palsy. Sometimes the tumor penetrates the saddle base and grows into the pterygoid sinus, but the neurological symptoms are not obvious for a short period of time.
Treatment: Surgical resection, radiotherapy and medication. The choice of treatment plan for individual cases must depend on the nature, size, pressure and erosion of the surrounding tissues, pituitary function, general condition and other specific conditions.
1.Surgical treatment: mainly includes craniotomy and transsphenoidal sinus surgery.
2.Radiotherapy: It has certain effect on pituitary adenoma, which can control the development of tumor and sometimes make the tumor shrink, resulting in improvement of visual field, but it cannot cure the tumor at all.
3.Medication: Bromocriptine is a semi-synthetic ergotamine alkaloid, which can stimulate the dopamine receptors of pituitary cells to reduce the prolactin in blood. After taking bromocriptine, it can reduce the size of prolactin adenoma, restore menstruation and ovulation and conception, and also suppress pathological overflow of breast milk. In addition, bromocriptine can also reduce the symptoms of growth hormone cell adenoma, but the dosage is large and the efficacy is poor. Cyproheptadine, which inhibits serotonin-stimulated ACTH-releasing hormone (CRH), and the growth inhibitory hormone analogue oxytocin, can cure growth hormone adenomas.