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Pituitary Tumor – Elderly Spot

January 26, 2022
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Transcript

It’s very common for people in their eighties or nineties to have this tiny spot on their pituitary. What a spot probably though deserves is the following, is a first a check of the hormones because sometimes these small spots or dots are hormonally active and you would want to know that and catch that early rather than late. And so seeing an endocrinologist or a neurologist or a neurosurgeon or even that patient’s internist would be a wise idea because they would probably want to run a battery of blood tests to make sure that this spot isn’t producing some dysfunction of the hormone system. But let’s say for the sake of argument that it’s not, because usually it isn’t. Then the appropriate next step for a small, and what does small mean? A few millimeters in size, abnormality. Well, how do we typically manage it? Well we do what we call surveillance imaging? And what that means is we basically check it again in a few months, make sure it’s not growing. And if it’s not, sometimes we’ll say, hey, look, it hasn’t grown in a three month period. Let’s check it every year or sometimes every other year to kind of keep an eye on it. And sometimes, you know, after an appropriate period of time and both patient and doctor get bored at looking at the same spot, a decision is made not to look any further and there is nothing inappropriate about that.

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