Pituitary Tumor – Prolactin Levels

Transcript

The administration of this medication or this category of medication are called Dopamine agonists. But if you give somebody who has a tumor that is secreting high, high amounts of this hormone called prolactin, by giving them this category of medication, not only will you suppress the secretion of prolactin, but in doing so, the tumor will actually begin to die off slowly. And so after a period of one or two years of this therapy, a lot of patients actually experience not just dramatic shrinkage of the tumor, but a cure. The illustration with MRI imaging is rather dramatic. So you sometimes got patients who come in with truly massive tumors of the skull base, destroyed parts of the skull base, compression of the optic chiasm. And one of the very, very first things a neurosurgeon or an endocrinologist will check in that circumstances a prolactin level because if that comes back markedly high, and what do we mean by markedly high? Anything over 100, 200 we’re very, very confident is a prolactinoma. And usually tumors that size will produce prolactin level in the thousands. And by giving of this category of medication, we really can see that tumors shrink and actually in many cases be cured.