For more than 20 years, Katie Hughes puzzled over the cause of her relentless barrage of crippling symptoms.
Heart palpitations, sudden weight gain, nausea and depression dogged her life from her late teens to her early 40s.
The mystery illness even made her hair fall out. Along the way, doctors blamed her lingering health issues on everything from her four pregnancies to Katie ‘making a fuss’.
So when the 49-year-old freelance writer from Cornwall was finally told that all her problems were caused by a fault in a tiny pea-sized bit of tissue deep inside her skull – called the pituitary gland – she was overwhelmed with relief.
Freelance writer Katie Hughes, 49, puzzled over the cause of her relentless barrage of crippling symptoms such as heart palpitations, sudden weight gain, nausea and depression. Doctors told her the issued were caused by a fault in deep inside her skull – the pituitary gland
Katie says: ‘Tears were pouring down my face and one thought ran through my brain: I finally know what’s wrong with me.’
And this malfunction, it turns out, may not have occurred randomly.
It could, doctors suspect, be linked to an innocuous bump to the head in childhood that at the time both she and her parents deemed insignificant.
The pituitary, shaped like a kidney bean, regulates the supply of vital hormones that help to keep the body functioning properly.
If it is damaged or malfunctions, it can trigger chemical imbalances that can lead to everything from chronic fatigue and unplanned weight loss to premature ageing and loss of libido or infertility.
This can have devastating consequences, as the pituitary gland not only manages the release of the hormone testosterone – vital for healthy muscles, bones, heart and libido – but also controls the release of other essential hormones, such as cortisol, which controls alertness.
The condition, known as hypopituitarism, has gone largely unrecognised for decades, with doctors blaming symptoms on a range of other factors.
But thanks in part to the extraordinary efforts of one woman – Oxford graduate and former teacher Joanna Lane – the number of people getting a proper diagnosis of hypopituitarism, and the treatment they need to overcome it, has soared.
In 2007 there were 6,243 patients in the UK diagnosed with hypopituitarism.
By the end of 2018, the number topped 18,000 – an increase experts attribute to greater awareness of the problem among doctors, rather than to a significant increase in cases.
Joanna, 71, from Surrey, lost her only son Christopher, aged 31, in 2008 when, depressed and unable to endure the agony and embarrassment of impotence, he ended his life.
As first reported in The Mail on Sunday, it was only after Christopher’s death that his mother joined up the dots and realised that her son’s depression and low testosterone could have been caused by a childhood head injury – she recalled he fell out of a tree aged seven.
The pituitary, shaped like a kidney bean, regulates the supply of vital hormones that help to keep the body functioning properly. If it is damaged or malfunctions, it can trigger chemical imbalances that can lead to chronic fatigue, unplanned weight loss or infertility (Stock image)
The consequent pituitary damage even had a name: post traumatic hypopituitarism.
Joanna – author of Mother Of A Suicide, a 2016 book telling
