Pituitary Tumor – Challenges

Transcript

Pituitary masses, one of the challenges with pituitary masses, which is something a little unique to it, is because it’s not only just a mass in the brain, but one that has endocrinological implications. So the pituitary is the master hormone gland of the body. And so unlike other parts of the brain where if you have a mass, other parts of the brain, you’re, you’re pretty much restricted to mass doing one of possibly three things. It grows and starts pushing on structures of the brain and causing their dysfunction. So that’s one way for a mass in the head to produce symptoms in a patient. Another way for a mass to produce symptoms in a patient is it can grow and irritate the brain and all of a sudden you get a seizure and then somebody goes to the emergency room and they get discovered, they got a mass in their brain. Yet another way is we’ve got fluid that flows through our brain. And if those fluid pathways get blocked up and you get a condition called hydrocephalus or water on the brain, and so masses in the brain can do that.