Is it hard to diagnose acromegaly?
Acromegaly is extremely difficult to diagnose. Patients’ growth hormone levels are slowly increasing over the course of many years and the changes are often subtle. Sometimes patients see someone they haven’t seen in a long time or a new physician, and that person comments on the changes, whereas patients won’t see them day-to-day in the mirror. In fact, if we look back at patients in terms of their symptoms before diagnosis, we find that patients probably had active acromegaly for at least 10 years prior to diagnosis. What are the goals for therapy in acromegaly? There are two major goals for the therapy. One is to reduce the tumor size in order to prevent the complications from the tumor on the brain. The second goal is to lower the growth hormone levels, because it is the growth hormone that circulates through the blood and leads to the changes in the body. The bony changes of acromegaly, which can be very marked and disfiguring, are usually there to stay. All the soft-tissue stuff—
