Study design
Search strategy
The following databases for studies addressing the recurrence of pituitary adenomas after transsphenoidal surgery were searched: PubMed, Cochrane Library, Web of Science, EMBASE, CINAHL, PsycINFO, Academic Search Premier and Science Direct. The final search was performed on August 1, 2011. We devised a search strategy for the mentioned databases with the help of a trained clinical librarian focusing on pituitary adenomas, treatment and recurrence after treatment. All relevant keyword variations were used, including free text words. The references of the relevant articles were checked for additional articles. Original articles in the English, German, French and Dutch languages were included. Studies were eligible for inclusion in this review when they fulfilled the following criteria: more than 20 patients included with a mean follow-up period of at least 1 year. Studies were excluded when restricted to elderly patients (>80 years) or adolescents and children, when patients underwent repeat pituitary surgery, pituitary irradiation, transcranial surgery, or in the presence of rare pituitary adenomas e.g. TSH secreting adenomas or functioning gonadotropinomas, hereditary tumors, e.g. MEN I syndrome or when regrowth and recurrence of nonfunctioning adenomas were considered as equivalent entities. In case of (partial) duplication of cohorts, the paper with the longest duration of follow-up was included in the review.
Data review and analysis
Initial selection of studies by title and abstract was performed by one reviewer (FR) and these studies were retrieved for full assessment. Three reviewers independently evaluated all studies and disagreement was resolved by consensus. The retrieved documents were screened and evaluated with a question list of 60 different items, which was then used to construct the database. The list included bibliographical details, background of the study, study design, recruitment period, inclusion and exclusion criteria, details on diagnosis, type of hormone assays used, normal test values, and eventual preoperative medical treatment. Furthermore we noted the number of included patients, the total number undergoing surgery, the number lost to follow-up, deaths, duration of follow-up, surgical details, criteria of cure, details of CT and MRI investigations, immediate postoperative results, surgically induced hypopituitarism, improved hypopituitarism, used methods for diagnosis of hypopituitarism, number of recurrences in time, histology of the tumor including immunohistochemistry, presence of invasiveness, and potential tumor growth factors. Finally we looked for recurrence-associated factors, e.g. age, gender, tumor size, postoperative hormone concentrations, invasiveness (macroscopic and microscopic), surgical technique, surgical center, biological tumor factors and the used statistical analyses.
Statistical analysis
Primary outcomes of this review were short-term remission after single surgery and induced pituitary failure. To this end we used the criteria set by the authors of each publication, either biochemical or in case of nonfunctioning adenoma (NFA) CT and/or MRI evaluation. The other main primary outcome was the incidence of recurrence of the adenoma after clinical cure, as reported by the authors. In case of NFA the postoperative CT or MRI should show no tumor remnant and studies using regrowth of a tumor remnant were excluded, unless a distinction between the two cases was made clearly. In addition we carefully evaluated clinical factors associated with recurrence were carefully evaluated. Statistical comparison between groups was done with ANOVA, with selected post-hoc contrasts. Regression analysis was used for time-dependent observations. P values < 0.05 were considered significant.
Discussion
An important outcome of surgery of pituitary adenomas is the immediate cure rate and the impact on normal pituitary function. In our study we restricted the analysis to studies that reported both short-term and long-term results of surgery in unselected patient series. Our data analyses demonstrate that patients with NFA have a lower chance of remission, which is not too surprising, because many patients are not diagnosed until the tumor is large resulting in compression of the optic chiasm with generally substantial supra- and para-sellar extension, making curative surgery less feasible than in (functioning) adenomas restricted to the sella turcica. Indeed, many studies in acromegaly, prolactinoma and Cushing’s disease, have stressed the difference in remission percentage between patients with a microadenoma and those with a macroadenoma [
34,
80,
152,
153]. The overall (initial) remission in patients with prolactinoma is comparable with the remission achieved in patients with acromegaly and Cushing’s disease, suggesting that the tumor type per se does not influence outcome.
Recurrence of a functioning adenoma was based on the reappearance of clinical signs and symptoms, confirmed by biochemical tests, as used by the authors. In order to allow a fair comparison with the other adenoma types, in NFA recurrence was defined as reappearance of an adenoma, thus excluding patients with growth of a tumor remnant, possible. For this review recurrence was either expressed as percentage of patients who could be followed-up and thus at risk for recurrence (thus controlling for deaths and other causes of follow-up failure) and as recurrence rate. The latter expression is the ratio of number of recurrences and total years of patients at risk, thus (partially) eliminating differences in follow-up time between studies. This study shows that patients with acromegaly had fewer recurrences than patients with other pituitary adenomas, both expressed as percentage and as recurrence rate. In contrast, patients with prolactinoma had a higher recurrence percentage and rate than patients with acromegaly or Cushing’s disease. At present, this behavior of prolactinoma is largely unexplained, but may be related to definition of cure, or to more frequent microscopic tumor infiltration into normal pituitary tissue, which is not removed at surgery.
Another interesting point emerging from this study is that the remission percentage of transsphenoidal surgery did not improve over the last three decades. The majority of papers (>95%) which were included in this review were based on traditional surgery using an operation microscope, without the use of other tools, such as intraoperative blood sampling of hormones, intraoperative use of MRI, neuronavigation or the additional use of an endoscope. If earlier reports estimated the remission percentage to be too high, a publication year-dependent decrease in recurrence percentage and rate would have been expected. Indeed, the review demonstrated a very moderate decrease in recurrence rate over the years, which could also be explained by improved surgical techniques, increased experience of neurosurgeons and the limitation of performance of pituitary operations to dedicated surgeons. Furthermore, a very weak correlation between remission and recurrence percentage was found, explaining only 3% of variability, indicating that remission and recurrence are largely independent phenomena. These observations, therefore, indicate that remission rates reported in earlier publications are not greatly influenced by less sensitive hormone assays in use at that time.
One might suppose that a longer follow-up period will lead to a higher recurrence rate. We investigated this hypothesis, which was only possible in studies which reported details on the time of recurrence after surgery, or gave sufficient data to calculate these data. Fortunately, the percentage of studies of the 4 tumor types reporting these details was comparable, and lying between 70 and 77%. For a meaningful comparison between studies, the time period was divided into bins of less than 1 year, between 1 and 5 years, between 6 and 10 years, and longer than 10 years. With the limitation that the majority of studies were shorter than 10 years, the incidence of recurrence peaked between 1 and 5 years, and not later. It is not unreasonable to assume that adenoma recurrences originate from tiny postoperative tumor remnants, with insufficient hormone secretion (or size) to affect biochemical tests or detection with high-resolution MRI. Apparently, the growth rates of these recurrent tumors are comparable, although recurrence of functional tumors is no guarantee that they can be detected by MRI or high resolution CT scanning.
The clinical factors of age, gender, tumor size and invasion had no predictive value in most studies, independently of the tumor type. However, there is no agreement whether silent corticotrope adenomas have a greater growth potential than NFA tumors. This matter is of some importance, since prophylactic postoperative irradiation has been advocated for this type of adenoma. However, our review indicates that this issue is still unsettled [
154]. Particularly, regarding acromegaly and prolactinoma one might expect that a normalized TRH test (normalization of a paradoxical GH increase in acromegaly and stimulatory PRL in prolactinoma) would indicate permanent cure. Indeed, in prolactinoma this was found in 3 studies, but not in another study. A comparable situation was found in acromegaly. A paradoxical TRH test in acromegaly is considered as non-diagnostic and thus clinically not useful, because it can be also present in other conditions, such as in children, anorexia nervosa, and serious liver disease [
155]. Interestingly, acromegalic patients with a paradoxical response of GH to TRH express the TRH receptor in the adenoma, while TRH-negative patients do not [
156], establishing the pathophysiological basis for this response. In a selected series of acromegalic patients who had a normal postoperative GH suppression (although differing in magnitude) and a normalized TRH test, only one recurrence was noted after a 14.3 years [
160]. Others also found the test useful [
157] but not all [
158,
159]. In our experience, if an abnormal TRH test is the only biochemical abnormality observed, it may take a long time before a relapse becomes clinically obvious, thus requiring long-term observations [
160]. The low number of reports in Cushing’s disease and acromegaly, relating outcome of hormone suppression tests with recurrence. renders the usefulness of this parameter doubtful at this time, and careful studies, such as initiated in acromegaly by Freda are required to establish its value [
148].
The most interesting predictor of recurrence was a low postoperative basal hormone concentration for functioning adenomas, and not dynamic tests, although these were not systematically investigated in most studies. Depending on the sensitivity and specificity of the assay, a low hormone concentration indicates no tumor remnant or a residual tumor mass which does not lead to clinical significant growth. Whether this latter hypothesis is correct can only be ascertained when more unselected studies with much longer follow-up become available.
New pituitary deficiencies caused by surgery were reported in only 60% of the publications. In the majority of these, only basal hormone concentrations were used, rather than dynamic tests. In addition, GH reserve was rarely investigated with stimulation tests. Nevertheless, pituitary function was most often disturbed in Cushing’s disease, which can be partially explained by long-term glucocorticoid dependency and the commonly observed permanent diabetes insipidus. It is also possible that more aggressive surgery was used than in other adenomas, because of the seriousness of the condition. In many studies details were insufficient to outline the precise distribution of newly developed pituitary malfunction.
A new approach in pituitary surgery is the endoscopic technique. For this review, we only found 4 studies exclusively using the endoscopic technique and with a sufficient follow-up period for inclusion. Available studies which compared traditional transsphenoidal microsurgery with the endoscopic surgery indicate that the endoscopic technique is associated with a shorter hospital stay, less blood loss, fewer nasal complications and less frequent diabetes insipidus. Although these findings are important, till now no major improvement of direct postoperative remission has been demonstrated and long-term data are not yet available [
161‐
163].
In summary, this analysis indicates that remission is lowest in patients with nonfunctioning adenomas, and recurrence is highest in patients with a prolactinoma. The remission rate has not improved over 3 decades of publication, but there is a modest decrease in recurrences with time. The highest incidence of tumor recurrence is between 1 and 5 years after surgery. Surgery-related hypopituitarism was highest in Cushing’s disease. The most important predictor for recurrence is the postoperative basal (non-stimulated) hormone level in functioning adenomas, while in nonfunctioning adenomas no single convincing factor could be identified.