Prevalence of empty sella syndrome

The empty sella syndrome (ESS) is a neurological or pathologic finding in which sella turcica is devoid of pituitary tissue and the subarachnoid space extends into sella turcica, which is either primary or secondary as well as partial and complete. The widespread use of CT scans and MRIs today has made the ESS a common finding in imaging. The aim of this study was to evaluate the prevalence of the empty sella syndrome.

This is a retrospective descriptive-analytic study in which all patients referred to Imam Ali Hospital (Zahedan) for electromagnetic brain imaging (n=1856) were recruited by cross-sectional sampling during the first 6 months from 21 March 2018 to 23 September 2018. Inclusion criteria included the absence of another known problem in the central nervous system and the absence of concurrent underlying disease. The data gathering tool was a questionnaire consisting of demographic and related variable to empty sella disorder.

The results of this study showed that the prevalence of empty sella was 8.2% with a mean age of 37.02±12.51 years. 66.4% of the patients were female. The prevalence of primary empty sella was 78.9% with a mean age of 34.51±11.26 years. 71.7% of the patients had partial empty sella. There was a significant difference between the mean age and sex of patients with empty sella and non-empty sella subjects (P=0.008) and (P<0.0001). There was a statistically significant difference between the mean age of affected patients with type of empty sella (P<0.0001). There was no statistically significant difference between mean age of patients with empty sella and severity of empty sella (P=0.056). There was no significant difference between the frequency of empty sella type and the severity with gender (P=0.224) and (P=0.091).

The findings of this study indicated that the overall prevalence of empty sella in the referring patients was relatively low. Most of them were females with primary type and minor severity.