Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Craniopharyngiomas are benign epitelial tumors located in the suprasellar region and they are associated to several comorbidities. Our aim is to describe hormonal deficiency and complications after surgery.

Design: Descriptive study of patients that underwent surgery of craniopharyngioma. Data collected included hormonal levels, clinical data and mortality. Quantitative variables with normal distribution are shown as mean and standard deviation and non-normal distribution variables are shown as median and quartiles. Qualitative variables are shown as percentage.

Results: 28 patients were researched (53.6% were men), ten of them were diagnosed in childhood with mean age of 47.9 (19.1) years old. Median age at diagnosis was 40 years old (11.5–62.5) and the median of follow-up was 7 years (2.3–15.5). At the time of diagnosis, patients presented visual defects (92.5%), headache (53.8%), polyuria and polydipsia (36.4%), behavior disorders (26.9%), small stature (7.7%), paresthesia (4%) and pubertal development delay (3.8%). The median of the tumor size was 30 mm (28–40). 64% of the tumors extended to the sellar region and 76.9% of the tumors spread out other cerebral regions. After surgery, all patients presented hormonal deficiency: TSH deficiency (100%), ACTH deficiency (96.3%), diabetes insipidus (88.9%), gonadotropin deficiency (88.9%) and GH deficiency (65.4%). After surgery, 18.8% of patients presented an improvement of visual defects. After 5 years of follow-up, the mortality was 17.4%. One patient died few days after surgery. Deceased patients were older at the time of diagnosis of craniopharyngioma (a difference of 28.8 years (CI 95%: 15.6–42.6)) and they presented a bigger tumor size (a difference of 33 mm (13) (NS).

Conclusion: In our study, patients that underwent surgery of craniopharyngioma presented partial hypopituitarism (46.1% of cases) and being absolute hypopituitarism in 53.8% of patients.