Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Pituitary apoplexy (PA) is a rare incident defined by the occurrence of necrosis and/or haemorrhage of the pituitary gland. The low incidence of PA makes it difficult to bring out from the studies its precipitating factors and especially its relationship with cardiovascular risk factors (CVR). The objectives of this studies were to characterize a number of patients with PA and to establish the link between PA and their CVRs.

Methods: It is a retrospective study including a group of patients in the Endocrinology department of Hedi Chaker Hospital in Sfax over an 18-year period (2000 – 2017). The data collected was analysed by the SPSS version 20 software.

Results: This study included 44 patients (20 women versus 24 men) with a mean age of 50.04 ± 12.58 years. Fourteen patients (31.8%) had a pituitary adenoma known before the onset of apoplexy, secreting in 9 cases. Precipitating factor have been found in 14 cases (31.8%). A high blood pressure was found in two cases. CVR were dominated by the presence of overweight in 27 patients (61.4%) and android obesity in 17 patients (38.6%), followed by smoking in 15 patients (34%) and type 2 diabetes in 11 patients (25%). Four patients had treated dyslipidaemia at diagnosis (9.1%): two patients had mixed dyslipidemia treated with atorvastatin andtwo patients had isolated hypertriglyceridemia treated with fibrates. Two patients had a cardiac history: unstable angina in one case andcoronary disease in the second. We analysed these features and we found no correlation between these factors and the occurrence of PA.

Conclusion: We conclude through these data that having weather a metabolic syndrome or a documented cardiovascular disease do not precipitate the occurrence of PA in patient with pituitary adenoma. We explain these results with the low number of this cohort and of the pathology itself.