Pregnancy Doesn't Boost Cushing Disease Recurrences

[~MaryO~]

Researchers published the study covered in this summary on Research Square as a preprint that has not yet been peer reviewed.

Key Takeaways

• Among women who underwent pituitary surgery to treat Cushing disease subsequent pregnancy had no apparent effect on Cushing disease recurrence, in a single-center review of 113 women treated over a 30-year period.

Why This Matters

• No single factor predicts the recurrence of Cushing disease during long-term follow-up of patients who have undergone pituitary surgery.

• This is the first study to assess the effect of pregnancy on Cushing disease recurrence in a group of reproductive-age women who initially showed post-surgical remission.

 

Study Design

• Retrospective study of 355 patients with confirmed Cushing disease who were admitted to a single tertiary hospital in Brazil between 1990 and 2020. All patients had transsphenoidal surgery, with a minimum follow-up of 6 months and median follow-up of 83 months. Remission occurred in 246 of these patients.

• The current analysis focused on 113 of the patients who achieved remission, were women, were 45 years old or younger at time of surgery (median 32 years old), and had information available on their obstetric history.

• Ninety-one of these women (81%) did not become pregnant after their surgery, and 22 (19%) became pregnant after surgery.

 

Key Results

• Among the 113 women in the main analysis 43 (38%) had a Cushing disease recurrence, a median of 48 months after their pituitary surgery.

• Following surgery, 11 women in each of the two subgroups (recurrence, no recurrence) became pregnant.

• Although the subgroup with recurrence had a higher incidence of pregnancy (11/43; 26%) compared with those with no recurrence (11/70; 16%) Kaplan-Meier analysis showed that survival free of Cushing disease recurrence was similar and not significantly different in the women with a postsurgical pregnancy and those who did not become pregnant (P=.531).

• The review also showed that, of the women who became pregnant, several obstetrical measures were similar between patients who had a recurrence and those who remained in remission, including number of pregnancies per patient, maternal weight gain, type of delivery (normal or cesarean), delivery time (term or premature), neonatal weight, and neonatal size. The review also showed roughly similar rates of maternal and fetal complications in these two subgroups of women who became pregnant.

Limitations

• The study was retrospective and included a relatively small number of patients.

• The authors collected information on obstetric history for some patients by telephone or email contacts.

Disclosures

• The study received no commercial funding.

• None of the authors had disclosures.

This is a summary of a preprint research study , " Pregnancy After Pituitary Surgery Does Not Influence the Recurrence of Cushing's Disease, " written by researchers at the Sao Paulo (Brazil) University Faculty of Medicine on Research Square provided to you by Medscape. This study has not yet been peer reviewed. The full text of the study can be found on researchsquare.com.