Pituitary gland protective bony enclosure called the sella turcica. It is composed of three lobes: anterior, intermediate, and posterior. In many animals, these three lobes are distinct.The intermediate is avascular and almost absent in human beings. The intermediate lobe is present in many lower animal species, in particular in rodents, mice and rats, that have been used extensively to study pituitary development and function. In all animals, the fleshy, glandular anterior pituitary is distinct from the neural composition of the posterior pituitary, which is an extension of the hypothalamus. The anterior pituitary arises from an invagination of the oral ectoderm and forms
Pituitary apoplexy or nonsecretory tumors, which do not produce excessive amounts of hormones; this might explain why the tumor has often gone undetected prior to an episode of apoplexy. The first case description of pituitary apoplexy has been attributed to the American neurologist Pearce Bailey in 1898. This was followed in 1905 by a further report from the German physician Bleibtreu. Surgery for pituitary apoplexy was described in 1925. Before the introduction of steroid replacement, the mortality from pituitary apoplexy approximated 50%. The name of the condition was coined in 1950 in a case series by physicians from Boston City Hospital and