The pituitary is a small piece of glandular tissue which sits within a bony saddle at the base of the skull. Called the "master" gland, it produces six major hormones including growth hormone, which regulates growth, and prolactin, necessary for lactation. It also produces a number of stimulating hormones, whose function is to prompt other glands, such as the thyroid, to secrete thyroid hormone into the blood system.
It has emerged that a pharmaceutical company made a donation to Our Lady's Hospital in return for pituitary gland tissue from post-mortems in the early 1980s. This might have been to enable the company to extract growth hormone from the pituitaries for use in treating short children.
These children require daily injections of growth hormone. Since 1985, this injection has been synthetically manufactured; however before this, the only source of growth hormone was from human pituitary glands obtained at autopsy. Each gland contains a relatively small amount of the hormone - usually 35 mg - which meant the availability of growth hormone for the treatment of short stature was limited.
The distribution of human pituitary growth hormone was discontinued in 1985 because of the development of Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (the human form of BSE) in some patients who were treated with human growth hormone.