Pituitary Tumor – Non Candidates

Transcript

Not everybody who has a pituitary mass or pituitary abnormality needs treatment. In fact, there’s a whole category that we’ve now kind of termed, for lack of a better word, pituitary incidentalomas. Probably, I’m not sure it’s made itself into the official medical lexicon yet, but basically what it means is that you’ve got a pituitary mass that or pituitary abnormality that we ended up discovering because somebody came in for imaging for an entirely unrelated reasons. So they were dizzy, had a headache, stroke workup. Any one of a number of things. And during the course of the MRI image review, all of a sudden we see this small mass in the pituitary or abnormality in the pituitary. And the question is what do we do about it? And oftentimes, for that kind of circumstances, especially, and if the patient is in older category, we may choose to do nothing. So how do we know that we’re going to do nothing? One, here, age does play a big role in it. People have looked at some studies and sometimes even up to 10% of people that are in an elderly age group will have some sort of pituitary abnormality if you look really, really close.