Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Prolactinoma is the prolactin secreting tumor of the pituitary gland which exerts mainly hypogonadal complaints and sometimes symptoms due to mass effect. Meanwhile it was mentioned to cause metabolic abnormalities such as increased fasting plasma glucose (FPG), Low Density Lipoprotein(LDL) cholesterol and triglycerides(TG). We studied whether some of these metabolic parametres of prolactinoma patients could be changed after the therapy.

Methods: This study was in retrospective design, enrolled 100 prolactinoma patients who were admitted to our endocrinology department. 49 of them did not require any treatment. 51 patients who were administered only drug therapy or both surgery and afterwards drug therapy were included. The drugs were cabergoline and bromocriptine. Metabolic variables and tumor dimensions on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) were studied at diagnosis and after therapy.

Results: Out of 51, 42 were female (82.4%) and nine (17.6%) were male. The age and disease duration did not vary according to sex. 4/9 (44.4%) of male and 7/42 (16.7%) of female harbored macroadenoma. Only three patients underwent pituitary surgery. Through whole group, LDL cholesterol (from 115.3±10.7 to 84.6±14.7, p:0.049) decreased significantly and TG level (from 150.5±26.3 to 121.7±18.5, p:0.30) decreased nonsignificantly accompanying a significant decrease in PRL levels (from 108.6±13.0 to 13.6±2.2, p:0.000) following treatment. The data were shown in detail in Table 1.

Conclusion

Metabolic variables such as FPG, HDL and TG did not show significant alteration while LDL decreased minimal significantly after achievement of PRL level’s normalization in our study. Previously, it was denoted FPG, TG and LDL decreased (P<0.005) after prolactinoma treatment, independent of BMI reduction or sex hormonal change. However, the initial metabolic conditions of their patients could be more undesired than our subjects’, that might be one reason for much willingness of their values to improve by treatment. Therefore, more studies in prospective design with higher number of patients is required to deliver more accurate results about this scheme.