Clinical and radiological diagnosis of hypophysitis: a review of literature and own data

Abstract

This article presents a literature review of the various forms of hypophysitis, its varieties, as well as the problem of radiation diagnosis and treatment of this pathology. Hypophysitis is a poorly understood and multifactorial disease which the difficulty of diagnosing is not only to a variety of nonspecific clinical manifestations and hormonal research data, but also the ambiguous results of MRI studies, the lack of clear MR patterns. The article reflects the main histological types of hypophysitis, the peculiarities of diagnosis in connection with general clinical symptoms, outlines the features of each type of hypophysitis with their own clinical observations. This review is devoted to modern ideas about the clinical course of hypophysitis, presented a set of characteristic diagnostic signs of the disease according to MRI and the treatment algorithms recommended today are also highlighted. The article summarizes data from foreign literature and our own clinical observations in order to develop an optimal protocol for MRI studies in patients with suspected hypophysitis, to develop recommendations for radiologists and endocrinologists for the correct results interpretation. The uniqueness of this review is the lack of data on the clinic, diagnosis and treatment of hypophysitis in the Russian literature today.