International Scholarly Research Network ISRN Endocrinology Volume 2012, Article ID 675310, 8 pages doi:10.5402/2012/675310 Research Article Long-Term Health-Related Quality of Life of Surgically Treated Pituitary Adenoma Patients: A Descriptive Study A. Raappana, 1 T. Piril¨ a, 2 T. Ebeling, 3 P. Salmela, 3 H. Sintonen, 4 and J. Koivukangas 5 1 Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, Institute of Clinical Medicine, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland 2 Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Lapland Central Hospital, Rovaniemi, Finland 3 Institute of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland 4 Department of Public Health, Hjelt Institute, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland 5 Department of Neurosurgery, Institute of Clinical Medicine, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland Correspondence should be addressed to A. Raappana, antti.raappana@oulu.fi Received 23 October 2012; Accepted 13 November 2012 Academic Editors: F. L. Forti and K. Hull Copyright © 2012 A. Raappana et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Context. The literature concerning the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of patients with surgically treated PA is controversial. Objective. To describe the long-term HRQoL of surgically treated patients in all PA classes. Design and subjects. The 15D, a generic HRQoL instrument producing a 15-dimensional profile and a single 15D index score (a difference ≥0.03 on a 0- 1 scale is considered clinically important), was used to assess the HRQoL of a 13-year surgical cohort of PA patients in Northern Finland. Results and Conclusion. Nighty-eight eligible consecutive patients with surgically treated PA were studied at an average of 6.3 years after their latest pituitary operation. The average postoperative 15D profiles in patients with non- functioning PA and in acromegalics without GH-suppressive medical treatment were similar to those of the age-standardized general population. However, after this rather long followup, the mean 15D score and the number of statistically significant 15D dimension impairments, compared with those of their reference population, were 0.11 and 9/15, 0.10 and 3/15, and 0.08 and 7/15 for Cushing’s disease, acromegalics needing somatostatin analog, and prolactinoma patients, respectively. Hypopituitarism with replacement medication was not associated with impaired HRQoL. The somatostatin-analog-associated HRQoL finding warrants further clinical research. 1. Introduction Pituitary adenomas (PAs) are benign neoplasms of the ade- nohypophysis, with an overall annual incidence of about 4/100 000. Prolactin-secreting prolactinomas and clinically non-functioning (NF) PAs are the most common PA classes, followed by, with decreasing incidence, GH- (acromegaly), ACTH- (Cushing’s disease, CD), and TSH-secreting (thy- rotropinoma) adenomas [1]. The treatment objectives in patients with pituitary adenoma are to eliminate possible mass effects of the tumor, to normalize possible hormonal and metabolic disturbances of the patient, and to recover normal health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Despite the endocrinologically and radiologically successful treatment of a hormonally active or non-functioning PA, both physical and mental adverse effects of the disease may persist thus causing permanent impairment of HRQoL [2, 3]. In the literature controversies exist about correlation of metabolic markers and subjective well-being of the patient, especially in acromegaly [4–8]. Also, there are controversies as to which PAs are associated with the most prominent HRQoL impairments [9, 10], and whether treated NFPAs cause HRQoL impairment at all [11, 12]. HRQoL assessment is important in clinical practice, as it gives the clinician information on issues that have paramount importance for the patients’ everyday life. In addition, it has been proposed that evaluation of HRQoL should be combined with hormonal assessment to detect more sensitively patients’ improvement during augmented medical therapy in acromegaly [4, 8]. Taking into account these multiple controversies and the emerged importance of patients’ subjective morbidity, our objective in this study was to use a generic, validated HRQoL instrument with domestic