Pituitary Tumor – Causes

Transcript

Most pituitary tumors just happen because they want to happen. And it’s not because you know, somebody smoked too much or drank too much. There are a couple of rare genetic conditions that can lead to pituitary tumors, but those account for but a fraction of the pituitary tumors. So by and large, these are just benign tumors that happen, and in fact, remarkably common. So if you start looking at the pituitary of everybody that dies of whatever cause, so typically you’re looking at people that are over the age of 80, dying of whatever cause sometimes just old age and you start looking at their pituitary very, very closely, as much as you know, 10% or higher of people, will have some pituitary abnormality. And so very, very common. And so for those, you know, quite frankly, these tiny little pituitary abnormalities, we don’t do a whole lot about. Sometimes we just recognize that they’re there, we follow them along, make sure they don’t get, bigger, big enough to cause a problem. But the bottom line here is small pituitary abnormalities are actually very, very common. And so a small pituitary abnormality in an older person oftentime not something to stress about too much.