Sep 28, 2026 · 7 min · 6 segments
A quiet week for top-tier acromegaly literature (four papers, mostly real-world/consensus rather than trial data) paired with a livelier rare disease industry week — a first-ever positive pivotal…
It was a quieter week for brand new trial data, but there's still some useful reading.
First up is a case series out of a single pituitary center.
It's published in the journal Pituitary, looking at six patients with treatment-resistant acromegaly who were put on a combination of passeratide and pegvizumab after surgery and other medical therapies hadn't gotten their disease under control.
All six patients got their IGF-1 levels back to normal and kept their tumors stable over a median of about three years on the combination.
One patient did have a relapse after nine months and needed further surgery, and three developed early signs of high blood sugar, which is a known risk with passeriatide.
The takeaway from the authors is that this combination can offer durable control for really hard-to-treat cases, but that blood sugar needs to be watched closely since pegvizumab doesn't seem to offset that side effect.
Next, a systematic review in the European Journal of Endocrinology looked at dietary interventions and vitamin D across pituitary tumors generally, including acromegaly.
The standout finding for our purposes is that a very low-carbohydrate ketogenic-style diet was associated with lower IGF-1 levels in acromegaly patients, and that replacing vitamin D3 was linked to a lower risk of vertebral fractures.
The evidence base here is small, just a handful of studies, so this isn't practice-changing yet, but it's a signal that diet and vitamin D status might be useful levers alongside standard treatment.
Also out this week, the Pituitary Society published a consensus statement from an international panel of 29 experts on when and how to use radiotherapy for pituitary adenomas, including the functioning tumors that cause acromegaly.
The panel agreed that these decisions should go through a multidisciplinary tumor board, that hormone control should continue while waiting for radiotherapy to take full effect, since that can take years, and that patients need to be followed for over a decade to properly assess whether the tumor comes back or side effects show up.
It's guidance rather than new data, but it's the kind of document that shapes how doctors sequence treatment in the real world.
And rounding out the research segment, a review in the same journal looked at how pituitary adenomas, including growth hormone-secreting tumors, show up differently in older patients, where normal aging can mask or mimic the disease and complicate both diagnosis and treatment decisions.
It's a general review rather than acromegaly-specific data, but it's a useful reminder that this population is getting older and that diagnosis doesn't always look textbook.
It was a quieter week for brand new trial data, but there's still some useful reading.
First up is a case series out of a single pituitary center.
It's published in the journal Pituitary, looking at six patients with treatment-resistant acromegaly who were put on a combination of passeratide and pegvizumab after surgery and other medical therapies hadn't gotten their disease under control.
All six patients got their IGF-1 levels back to normal and kept their tumors stable over a median of about three years on the combination.
One patient did have a relapse after nine months and needed further surgery, and three developed early signs of high blood sugar, which is a known risk with passeriatide.
The takeaway from the authors is that this combination can offer durable control for really hard-to-treat cases, but that blood sugar needs to be watched closely since pegvizumab doesn't seem to offset that side effect.
Next, a systematic review in the European Journal of Endocrinology looked at dietary interventions and vitamin D across pituitary tumors generally, including acromegaly.
The standout finding for our purposes is that a very low-carbohydrate ketogenic-style diet was associated with lower IGF-1 levels in acromegaly patients, and that replacing vitamin D3 was linked to a lower risk of vertebral fractures.
The evidence base here is small, just a handful of studies, so this isn't practice-changing yet, but it's a signal that diet and vitamin D status might be useful levers alongside standard treatment.
Also out this week, the Pituitary Society published a consensus statement from an international panel of 29 experts on when and how to use radiotherapy for pituitary adenomas, including the functioning tumors that cause acromegaly.
The panel agreed that these decisions should go through a multidisciplinary tumor board, that hormone control should continue while waiting for radiotherapy to take full effect, since that can take years, and that patients need to be followed for over a decade to properly assess whether the tumor comes back or side effects show up.
It's guidance rather than new data, but it's the kind of document that shapes how doctors sequence treatment in the real world.
And rounding out the research segment, a review in the same journal looked at how pituitary adenomas, including growth hormone-secreting tumors, show up differently in older patients, where normal aging can mask or mimic the disease and complicate both diagnosis and treatment decisions.
It's a general review rather than acromegaly-specific data, but it's a useful reminder that this population is getting older and that diagnosis doesn't always look textbook.
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