Pituitary Tumor – Need Treatment

Transcript

Pituitary tumors, we’ll chat a little bit about, first of all, who actually should get treatment for a pituitary tumor because not everybody who harbors a pituitary tumor or pituitary mass needs any treatment at all. So in the case of pituitary tumors, if we just remember back to where they’re located, sort of near the geometric center of somebody’s head, the base of the skull, in a little hollow called the Sella Turcica. When pituitary tumors or pituitary masses grow, one of the first things that they’re going to see is a structure called the optic chiasm, which is where the two optic nerves meet. And if that gets compressed, then people can suffer visual decline. And so one fairly compelling reason to treat pituitary tumors is when the tumor size gets so large that it pushes on this structure, produces dysfunction of this structure called the optic chiasm, and people’s vision is threatened. And that’s a very, very compelling reason to do something about pituitary masses.