Endocrine Abstracts

We report a 17-year-old male who presented with symptoms of absent secondary sexual characteristics, decreased appetite and infrequent non-specific abdominal pain. He had no complaints of headache, altered sense of smell or colour blindness. His other siblings had normal growth.On examination, he had normal male body habitus, height (157 cm), no gynaecomastia, axillary and beard hair (tanner stage 1) pubic hair (tanner stage 2), testes (12 ml bilaterally...

We report of a 71-year-old gentleman first diagnosed with acromegaly in 1981. He was initially treated with hypophysectomy and radiotherapy and subsequently bromocriptine therapy; requiring increments in the dose over the next ten-years (1981–1991) by which time he remained on maintenance dose of 10mgs thrice-daily. Bromocriptine was tolerated well and the patient had no side effects. Treatment was weaned off due to improvement in patient’s symptoms and growth hormon...

Autoimmune hypophysitis is a rare disease with only 28 cases reported in UK so far. Subsequent pregnancy, especially after pituitary surgery, is even more rare. We report a 34-year-old lady who presented 5 weeks after the birth of her second child with visual loss and headache. Subsequent investigations revealed a pituitary macroadenoma with suprasellar extension and chiasmal compression. She underwent transphenoidal adenomectomy with complete recovery of vision. Preoperativel...

We evaluate the short and long-term outcomes following diagnosis and treatment of pituitary dependent Cushing’s disease from a single centre. From 1971, there were 47 patients with proven endogenous cortisol excess, of whom, 43 (92%) had pituitary dependent Cushing’s disease. The median age of this cohort was 38±11years and the majority (77%) were females. 17 patients had primary treatment either with radiotherapy (n=9), bilateral adrenalectomy (n=...

Acromegaly and hypopituitarism are associated with elevated standardised mortality ratios (SMR) of between 1.3–3 and 1.2–2.17, respectively. There is little data on the role of hypopituitarism and in particular ACTH deficiency on mortality in patients with acromegaly and less still known about the role of hydrocortisone (HC) replacement. There is data to suggest that previous HC regimens may have overestimated normal cortisol production rates and recent data that hig...