What are the causes of acromegaly?

The human body uses certain hormones to grow growth. If these hormones become unbalanced, for example in the case of a disease known as acromegaly, the body grows abnormally. The causes of acromegaly are a cancerous nature, but most of them are benign and it is not a naturally threatening life. Cancer usually affects the gland that produces the basic growth hormone, but cancer in another part of the body can also be one of the causes of acromegaly.

Acromegalia is characterized by abnormal growth of bone and cartilage. It occurs in adults, although a similar disease in children results in a condition called gigantism. The patient's first symptoms usually include legs and hands enlargement, and the name acromegaly is actually derived from the words for limbs and enlargement in Greek. As the disease progresses, the natural bone structure of the face changes, which makes it the jaw and eyebrows protrudes and enlarges the nose. Other signsACRomegaly include arthritis, carpal ton syndromeElu and the joints hurt.

The process of bone growth and cartilage is involved in four different hormones. Growth hormone (GH) is important that is produced by pituitary gland in the brain. The tumor in this gland can stimulate the overproduction of GH and therefore abnormal overgrowth of the bone and cartilage of acromegaly. According to National Health Institutes (NIH) in the US, more than 95 percent of patients with acromegalia suffer from this gland tumor. Most of these tumors arise spontaneously, where one pituitary is changed by cancerous mutation and begins to multiply.

In rare cases where the causes of acromegaly do not include the pituitary tumor, other parts of the body are affected. Sometimes the tumor directly produces GH. Most often, the tumors do not produce GH, but instead cause exaggeration of another hormone called hormone releasing growth hormones (GHRH). Ghrh stimulates the pituitary gland to produce GH and therefore become one of the causes of acromegaly.

gh is thereforecentrally connected in all cases of acromegaly. Its production is controlled by GHRH levels and then passes through the blood into the liver. Heter cells feel GH and release another hormone called insulin growth factor I (IGF-I).

IGF-I is a hormone that acts directly on the body to create excess growth. When IGF-I gets to a sufficiently high level, healthy pituitary gland feels IGF-I and suitably reduces its GH production. Reduced GH concentration lowers IGF-I levels and growth stops.

Another hormone involved in GH control is somatostatin. Somatostatin blocks the pituitary gland in GH production. In healthy people, the interaction between these four hormones and the control effect they have on top of each other is tuned, but in acromegalic patients this system is out of balance. According to NIH, small benign pituitary tumors are actually quite common and up to 17 percent of the US population have them, but do not show any symptoms of growth disorder.