Pituitary Gland

BOSTON -- Just what baseball needed before its most eagerly awaited game of the postseason -- a performance-enhancing-drug scandal involving a popular player on the Cleveland Indians, who had enough on their plates trying to prepare for Game 7 of the American League Championship Series against the Boston Red Sox on Sunday night.

BOSTON -- Just what baseball needed before its most eagerly awaited game of the postseason -- a performance-enhancing-drug scandal involving a popular player on the Cleveland Indians, who had enough on their plates trying to prepare for Game 7 of the American League Championship Series against the Boston Red Sox on Sunday night.

A woman treated with fertility drugs is pregnant with a record number of 12 embryos, but chances are great that she will not be able to bring any to term, an Israeli doctor says. Dr. Jehoshua Dor of Tel Hashomer Hospital outside Tel Aviv said in an interview Wednesday that some of the embryos will have to be removed from the womb if the pregnancy is to succeed--but that the process risks damaging others.

One in five adults may have a noncancerous tumor on their pituitary, a pea-sized gland in the brain that plays a central role in regulating the body's hormones, according to research released Friday. At least one in three of those tumors may cause significant clinical problems. The finding, presented in San Antonio at the annual meeting of the American Assn. of Clinical Endocrinologists, should not be a cause for alarm, says endocrinologist Dr. Keith Friend, who coordinated the research.

A new approach to treating children with growth disorders caused by insufficient production of human growth hormone is being successfully tested clinically, according to chemist Arthur Felix of Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. in Nutley, N.J. Such children are now treated with hormone produced in bacteria through genetic engineering techniques, but the relatively expensive protein must be used in fairly large amounts and must be injected three times a week....

One in five adults may have a noncancerous tumor on their pituitary, a pea-sized gland in the brain that plays a central role in regulating the body's hormones, according to research released Friday. At least one in three of those tumors may cause significant clinical problems. The finding, presented in San Antonio at the annual meeting of the American Assn. of Clinical Endocrinologists, should not be a cause for alarm, says endocrinologist Dr. Keith Friend, who coordinated the research.

"Oh, you mean the guy with the 70-year-old head and the 20-year-old body-builder body? That picture has got to be Photoshopped." Dr. Jeffry Life smiles when I tell him about the general reaction I get about the famous picture of him with his shirt off, the shot that turned a mild-mannered doctor in his mid-60s into a poster boy for super-fit aging and controversial hormone replacement Appearing in medical-clinic ads in airline magazines and...

Breaking four years of silence, two-time Olympian Diane Williams said Sunday that she took anabolic steroids before the 1984 Los Angeles Games. Williams, 28, who finished fourth in the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic trials in July, 1984, also said in an interview with ABC's Donna de Varona that she failed a drug test during the trials in the Coliseum.

Now that we've entered the annual season of "goodwill toward men," it seems like an excellent time to consider oxytocin, a hormone that has gotten attention in recent years as the grooviest thing since lava lamps and love beads. Oxytocin is secreted by the pituitary gland, and it has effects on regions of the body of a type that you memorize for a final exam and then promptly forget. But oxytocin also gets into the brain, where it affects behavior. How? For starters, oxytocin promotes maternal behavior in rodents.

Dr. David L. Rimoin, a medical geneticist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center who pioneered studies of dwarfism and other skeletal abnormalities, died Sunday at the Los Angeles hospital. He was 75 and had been diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer days earlier. Rimoin was also among the first to recognize that diabetes is caused by a variety of genetic abnormalities and he played an influential role in establishing screening programs for Tay-Sachs disease. FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of this obituary said Dr. David L. Rimoin recruited Dr. Michael M. Kaback to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in 1970.

A woman treated with fertility drugs is pregnant with a record number of 12 embryos, but chances are great that she will not be able to bring any to term, an Israeli doctor says. Dr. Jehoshua Dor of Tel Hashomer Hospital outside Tel Aviv said in an interview Wednesday that some of the embryos will have to be removed from the womb if the pregnancy is to succeed--but that the process risks damaging others.

A new approach to treating children with growth disorders caused by insufficient production of human growth hormone is being successfully tested clinically, according to chemist Arthur Felix of Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. in Nutley, N.J. Such children are now treated with hormone produced in bacteria through genetic engineering techniques, but the relatively expensive protein must be used in fairly large amounts and must be injected three times a week....

Behind the shimmering prospect of a newly approved prescription weight-loss medication and the possibility of two more to come is a more distant glimmer of hope for those who have already cracked the obesity barrier: a vaccine that could reset the body's metabolism and prompt weight loss even with a modest change in calories taken in or burned up in exercise. New research on mice demonstrates it could happen. The study tried two different formulations of a vaccine designed to reduce production of the hormone somatostatin in mice that had become obese after they were routinely fed high-fat chow.

It's a good thing Pio Pico served as California's governor long before the age of television -- his broad forehead, bulbous nose and protruding jaw prompted the author Gertrude Atherton to observe in 1902 that "an uglier man than Pio Pico rarely had entered this world." Now a neurologist believes he knows why Pico was so hard on the eyes: He probably suffered from acromegaly, a metabolic disorder that causes cartilage and soft tissues in the face and extremities to grow grotesquely large. Dr.