Poster Presentation ESA-SRB-APEG-NZSE 2022

Health-related quality of life is impaired in pre-operative patients with functioning and non-functioning pituitary lesions in an Australian cohort. (#304)

Nicholas Shoung 1 , Ann McCormack 1
  1. Diabetes and Endocrinology, St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, NSW, Australia

There are a number of lesions that can arise in the sellar and suprasellar space; the most common of which are pituitary neuroendocrine tumours1, benign neoplasms, reported to occur in 20% of the population2 with increasing incidence and prevalence3. Other lesions include Rathke’s cleft cysts, often asymptomatic remnants of embryological development, which can account for up to 3% of pituitary mass lesions2.

 

Pituitary neuroendocrine tumours can be non-functioning or hypersecreting and like Rathke’s cleft cysts may also cause compression of surrounding structures requiring surgical intervention. Patients with hypersecreting or compressive lesions can develop symptoms that can affect their quality of life and there are multiple scales clinicians use to measure this impact. One of these is the Short Form-36 (SF-36) scale, a 36-question general quality of life scale that be used across different diseases; measuring quality of life in both physical and mental health domains4. This scale measures quality of life compared to calculated norm-based scores from population in the United States of America from 1998.

 

There are a number studies investigating the quality of life in patients with treated pituitary neuroendocrine tumours5. However, there are few studies investigating the effect on quality of life of pre-treated pituitary neuroendocrine tumours6,7 and no studies comparing the effect of different pituitary neuroendocrine tumours or Rathke’s cleft cysts in an Australian cohort using norm-based scores calculated from an Australian population8.

 

We retrospectively analysed the SF-36 questionnaires of 229 patients attending a pre-operative outpatient appointment and calculated their physical and mental quality of life scores against Australian norm-based scores. We also investigate the effect of gender or age group, in each tumour type, on SF-36 scores to identify patients at higher risk of impaired quality of life.  

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