Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Acromegaly has various complications that significantly alter patients’ lives, one of which is developing neoplasia, a subject of high interest in the scientific community during the last years but without any firm conclusions.

Aim: The main objective of this paper was to verify if Romanian acromegalic patients are susceptible to developing neoplasia and what types of tumors are associated with acromegaly. Another purpose of the paper was to identify the risk factors involved in tumor predisposition.

Methods: This observational, retrospective study considered 336 acromegalic patients (217 of them females, 64.6%) followed from 2001 until 2015 in report to the evolution of acromegaly and the development of associated diseases, mainly neoplasia.

Results: Acromegalic patients had a higher risk of developing associated neoplasia (40% benign and 10% malignant). Activity of the disease was not an important factor (except for the thyroid – 54.84% of the patients had active acromegaly), whereas initial values of IGF-1 seemed to influence the developing of prostate neoplasia (mean corrected value 4.58, P=0.025). Sex has proved to be a factor too: women were more prone to developing neoplasia than men (57.14 vs 34.29%), and especially multiple types of tumors. The most frequently associated types of neoplasia in our patients were developed in: thyroid (47% women, 20.95% men), breast (11.93%) and uterus (5.99%)-for women, and colon (9.52%) and prostate (6.67%)-for men. The longer the duration of active acromegaly the higher was the risk of developing colonic neoplasia.

Conclusions: The results suggest that we need to perform a more meticulously screening of associated tumours in acromegalic patients, not only using ultrasound and colonoscopy for the thyroid gland and colon, but also mammography as well as PSA level determination. These evaluations should be taken into consideration periodically in all our acromegalic patients, regardless of the evolution of their main disease.