Ashley Shoemaker, MD, an endocrinologist, explains why rapid weight gain after hypothalamic injury may signal HO.
Transcript
The biggest reason for having suspicion for HO really is anyone with an injury to that critical brain region.
So we’d like for doctors and patients to be looking for HO if it’s a patient who’s at risk. So if they have damage to their pituitary gland, their optic nerves, or other areas of the hypothalamus, and then typically what we will see is this rapid weight gain in the first year, particularly the first six months post-injury.
The exception is sometimes patients who have had radiation, the cell death can be a little slower, and so it can be slightly more slow in onset without as much of an inflection point or this drastic change, but typically over a six- to 12-month period, you can see a change in the rate at which someone’s gaining weight.
And that should be triggering doctors to recognize that this may be HO.
