Introduction ACROMEGALY, a spectacular disorder of somatic growth and proportion, has fascinated endocrinologists for the past century and was the first pituitary disorder to be clinically recognized (1). Pituitary adenomas are common, being found in 15–25% of autopsies (2–4), but GH-secreting adenomas probably account for et al. (5) studied a population of 3.1 million and concluded that a firm diagnosis of acromegaly had been made in 164 patients during an 11-year period. In half of these patients the diagnosis of acromegaly was made on clinical grounds alone while the other half required confirmation of the diagnosis by assay of human GH.