Prolactinoma Support Group
A prolactinoma is a benign tumor of the pituitary gland that produces a hormone called prolactin. It is the most common type of pituitary tumor. Symptoms of prolactinoma are caused by too much prolactin in the blood or by pressure of the tumor on surrounding tissues. Prolactin stimulates the breast to produce milk during pregnancy. After delivery of the baby, a mother's...
So I live in an area of about ten thousand people in about a 20 mile radius and I have officially met 6 other people who have a pituitary tumor and one of them has a Cushing's tumor and another one is unknown. The others are prolactinomas. These people have either been born and raised here or are from here and live in other towns.
Now I know that these tumors are supposedly like one in 7,000 or something like that so WHY are there so many pituitary tumors in such a small area.
The girl that I talked to today is lactating but was told she was fine and "some women just do that". Her brother has the unknown tumor and is currently getting treatment for it in Seattle.
She told me that it MUST be the potato farming that we have around here and the pesticides that they use.
Her brother was riding his bike down the road one day and was accidently sprayed by a plane flying over. It made their whole family sick and now he has a brain tumor and a pituitary tumor? WHAT THE HELL!!!!!
Now I know that these tumors are supposedly like one in 7,000 or something like that so WHY are there so many pituitary tumors in such a small area.
The girl that I talked to today is lactating but was told she was fine and "some women just do that". Her brother has the unknown tumor and is currently getting treatment for it in Seattle.
She told me that it MUST be the potato farming that we have around here and the pesticides that they use.
Her brother was riding his bike down the road one day and was accidently sprayed by a plane flying over. It made their whole family sick and now he has a brain tumor and a pituitary tumor? WHAT THE HELL!!!!!
It sounds like your local press need to get hold of this so something can be done asap. Scary.
These levels - which are similar right across the world - tend to suggest that the cause is not due to localised environmental factors - its fashionable to want to blame someone - but in this case it might just be the way things are.
In fact its surprising you have not heard of more cases!
We used to play with the Black Flag sprayers when they ran out of insecticide. We've sprayed one another in the face with them...
I do not think there is any need to overreact. Statistically speaking, one instance of 6 in 10,000 is insignificant. The human brain is very good at detecting patterns and trying to find explanations for things. If pesticides were the cause, I'm betting a LOT more people would have prolactinomas.
I don't think wanting to know what caused these things is overreacting.
And there are LOTS of harmful effects of things that our government, big pharma, agribusiness & Monsanto don't want us to know. For example, do they really want to do honest studies on how Genetically Modified Foods & all the additives, preservatives, dyes & high fructose corn syrup that are in the American diet effect our health?? I think not.
They want to use the cheapest, fastest, most profitable ingredients possible. We still won't ban aspartame when other countries have. And look at how autism has skyrocketed in recent decades... something is going on.
I think we're still a bit in "the dark ages" regarding these prolactinomas. I have many unusual symptoms that my dr hasn't heard of before. My head still shakes internally at night & after asking 7 different doctors, not one has any idea what's causing it. I don't expect them to have all the answers, but I also don't think many of them realize the extent of the symptoms you can have with a prolactinoma & the medicine.
Patience, Love & Grace for us All :)
You use the rise of autism as an example, and I am not familiar with this phenomenon, but again it seems as though improved medicine is the reason. We are better at diagnosing autism and recognizing the symptoms, so more people have autism than before. There are so many degrees of autism, from incredibly mild to very drastic, so it is not that surprising that many forms of mild autism evaded diagnosis until recently when we had learned more about the condition.
Also, we can't attribute all our physical and mental ailments to our prolactinomas. Your head shakes at night may have nothing to do with your prolactinoma, so you could be searching in the wrong place. A lot of people assign the blame of weight gain to prolactinomas: I might be a victim of my prolactinoma, or I might just be a lazy fatty.
We shouldn't underestimate the advances in medicine so easily and the impacts that they have had. My prolactinoma was 6cmx5cmx5cm and started to impair my vision because of pressure on the optic nerve. I'm in my twenties. Yet, if I lived less than 100 years ago, I would have gone blind and died before the age of 30. The advances in medicine in the past 20 years have been monumental. I don't think we can underestimate the effect this has on number of diagnoses.
Not trying to sound mean, I'm just trying to be realistic.
Most of us are too ill to do any lobbying and it doesn't hurt to exchange possibilities here. It's also an amazing forum for finding out the real symptoms of this. Enough people have mentioned weight and depression and lack of energy that without a shadow of a doubt reading this board for over a year, these are genuine symptoms (me personally, my weight gain is because I haven't had the energy to exercise, and I just can't seem to build that up again). As are headaches, but the medical profession accepts that symptom only.
The tumour messing with cortisol levels and causing an inability to handle stress is another common symptom. Changes in cognitive abilities come up fairly frequently too (though I can't explain that but there is so much we still don't know about the human body).
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that this board is invaluable and it would probably do some endos a hell of a lot of good reading it once in a while.
"Autopsy studies indicate that 6-25% of the U. S. population have small pituitary tumors. Forty percent of these pituitary tumors produce prolactin, but most are not considered clinically significant. Clinically significant pituitary tumors affect the health of approximately 14 out of 100,000 people."
That means clinically significant tumours are rare, and anyway autopsy studies isn't a great measurement. You would find a lot of other conditions common as well, for example prostate cancer, but that doesn't mean that people aren't affected by that disease.
Regarding the cause I saw this..
"The xenoestrogenic chemical Bisphenol-A has been shown to lead to hyperprolactinaemia and growth of prolactin-producing pituitary cells.[2] The increasing and prolonged exposure of Bisphenol-A from childhood on, may contribute to the growth of a Prolactinoma."
That doesn't mean they've caused our prolactinomas, but at the same I don't believe that many of these chemicals we've grown up with and been affected by are good for our health.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolactinoma