Ashley Shoemaker, MD, explains how endocrinologists and other specialists work together to manage acquired HO and related medical problems.
Transcript
Yeah, so if you can put together a team of specialists, it’s always great. I’ll be honest. Most of our patients are typically managed by mostly their endocrinologist because of their pituitary deficiencies.
That tends to be the doctor that they spend the most time with at the beginning, especially for patients who have tumors.
If we’re looking at patients that might need radiation or surgery, we try to have the endocrinologist and the neurosurgeon and the interventional radiologist or anyone else that’s part of that sort of treatment team work together to try to balance the desire to treat and remove the tumor without causing excessive damage and raising the risk of things like HO.
So, at the beginning, we’re trying to minimize damage to the hypothalamus and get as many people together as possible. And then after that, it really depends on each individual person’s medical problems. So, what are they having trouble with?
Some of our patients need to see a neurologist if they have issues with seizures and making sure that those medications are well controlled.
They may need a sleep medicine specialist if they’re having issues with sleep apnea from their weight gain. Some of our patients see developmental pediatricians because we know that radiation and other treatments for brain tumors can affect development of our pediatric patients.
So really, just trying to think about all of the problems that can come along with this hypothalamic injury and how we can work together to to treat them.
But typically, patients are going to be most frequently followed by their endocrinologist, since that’s the person that is oftentimes prescribing the most medications and having to do the most adjustments, so that’s going to tend to be the team leader.
