Early diagnosis and post-operative follow-up of 50 Chinese children with craniopharyngioma.

Background: Craniopharyngioma is a relatively common congenital intracranial tumour for children. But only few available studies focused on the endocrine evaluation before diagnosis and post-operative endocrine evaluations of children with craniopharyngioma.

Aim: This study aims to aid in the early diagnosis of craniopharyngioma (CP) and follow-up post-operative children suffered from craniopharyngioma.

Methods: Craniopharyngioma patients, as the CP group (n = 50), and healthy children, as the control group (n = 30), the symptoms and pituitary hormone levels were reviewed and investigated.

Results: The pre-operative levels of peak of GH, IGF-1, FT4, ACTH, COR and PRL of CP patients were significantly lower than those of the control group (all the P ≤ 0.001). Levels of pituitary-hormones after surgery were significantly lower than both those before surgery and those of the control group (all the P ≤ 0.001). HGH treatment could significantly improve the growth velocity of post-operative children (3.8 ± 1.5 cm/year vs 13.0 ± 3.4 cm/year for males, P ≤ 0.001; 4.0 ± 1.3 cm/year vs 12.7 ± 1.8 cm/year for females, P ≤ 0.001).

Conclusions: Children presenting with endocrine disturbance symptoms combined with pituitary hormone deficits should be assessed by MRI to exclude craniopharyngioma earlier. Also, long-term follow-up study was very essential to craniopharyngioma survivors.