What does the pituitary gland do?

Endocrinology is the study of the body’s hormones. Hormones can be likened to chemical letters that circulate around the body in the bloodstream. These letters come from a post office located deep in the middle of the brain. This post office is a tiny little gland right in the middle of the brain called the pituitary gland. The pituitary gland receives messages from above in the hypothalamus.

The back part of the pituitary gland

The pituitary itself is split into two halves—the front part and the back part. From the back of the gland, there are messages that control our water balance and our thirst. That's a very vital function and controls the amount we drink.

The front part of the pituitary gland

The front of the gland sends messages that control growth, tell us when to go into puberty, control our fertility, and send very important messages that affect stress, the cortisol function, which is our fight or flight response. This is the reason we get jetlagged when travelling long distances. The pituitary also sends messages to the thyroid gland which is important for metabolism.

The pituitary gland is responsible for controlling vital functions that we take for granted. Together with the hypothalamus, it constitutes the most important endocrine organ and it is the master gland. It’s responsible for many conditions that we take for granted and in controlling a lot of the functions of the target glands in the body.

Pituitary gland and growth

Delayed growth

In children, the most common cause of delayed growth and puberty is actually a physiological delay of the message from the pituitary gland, especially common in boys and is a natural process. We have to differentiate that from a true deficiency of the pubertal messages, which can sometimes occur and also deficiency of growth hormone, usually because there’s a lesion or a mass that we need to explain in the pituitary.

Growth advance and early puberty

Growth advance and early puberty may be because of a disrupted hypothalamus or pituitary. That again may be caused because there is an abnormality, a lesion in the pituitary. The other possibility is that there are conditions of the adrenal gland which cause excess of hormones from the adrenal glands such as congenital adrenal hyperplasia which can act as puberty, but is not a true driven puberty. We call it a gonadotropin-independent precocious puberty. That early puberty is really the most common cause of growth advance.

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