[MUSIC] So hypothalamus controls many of the hormones that the body produces, including all of the hormones produced and secreted from the pituitary. We're going to look at one of these hormones in particular, and that's growth hormone. Usually during the night you have a pulsative release of growth hormone, and that leads you to grow. Until sort of the, towards the end of adolescents at which point you stop growing. There is, there are tumors that happen in the pituitary, that cause the growth hormone secreting cells to multiply. And like other pituitary tumors, these cells are not going to go and metastasize, but because they're secreting growth hormone, and now they're more numerous, there is more growth hormone secreted. Now the result of this is that people grow up, and people with a growth hormone secreting tumor, will either get something called Gigantism, if they get it prior to the end of, of adolescence or they will get acromegaly if they get it as adults. And what I show here is a skeleton of an individual who had acromegaly. So, this is Augie Kimble, my lovely assistant, who is holding up a skeleton and you can see that. The person is about the same height as Auggie, who's kind of an average height, from six feet or so, 2 meters, little under 2 meters. And you can see that he's not, he's not, this individual's not excessively tall but is quite a barrel of a chest. And when we look at, his skull, we see that there's this very enhanced brow. There's an excess growth of the lower jaw so that he has a, severe underbite. And this is typical of a Acromegaly. It comes on slowly, it develops over time and, typically actually, doesn't, the person doesn't realize they have it for about a dozen years or so. If this happens to a kid, then they can grow to be very, very tall. And so, in fact, the the, the record, I think, for the tallest person was an individual with gigantism, who grew to be over eight feet tall. Which is clo-, close to, close to 3 meters, so under about 2.5 meters or so. So really tall, and the problem with this is that the tumor is sitting in the pituitary, and the pituitary is sitting right here. So let's like take another look at that, here's the base of the brain and, and the pituitary is, is snug up right in here. Well that's a really hard place to get to. And let's just take this look, which tells us how in fact surgeons do get to the pituitary. They go through the nose, so we're looking at the base of the skull. The, this area right here is called the curve-form plate, and just below that, on the other side of that, is the nose. So the surgeon can come in through this, and come right here to the pituitary, which is going to sit right there. That's the preferred, treatment, the problem is that it's not that easy, and sometimes some part of the pituitary gets nicked, and some unfortunate, un, unwanted symptom arises. I was just reading about a young girl who had an intracranial tumor. Not at the pituitary one, but one that was located very close to the pituitary. And her pituitary got nicked, and she ended up with a insatiable appetite, and she's she's bloomed up, she can't do anything about it. It's it's devastating to her life, and her family's life. so, nicking the pituitary, damaging other parts of the pituitary, when it's only these one type of cells that have, have multiplied. Is a big danger, and so treating both gigantism and acromegaly, is not as simple as one would hope for. In the next unit, what we're going to do is look at a different type of hormone, one involved in postpartum depression. [MUSIC]
