For eight years, a 41-year-old woman kept gaining weight, felt exhausted, and developed type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure. When doctors finally traced her illness to Cushing's syndrome, the hormone-making tumor behind it turned up somewhere few would think to look: inside her right maxillary sinus, the air-filled cavity in the cheek beside the nose.
The tumor was made of pituitary tissue, the kind normally found in the pea-sized gland at the base of the brain. A team of endocrinologists, ear, nose, and throat surgeons, and a pathologist from two Bristol, England, hospital trusts described the case in a report in the Turkish Archives of Otorhinolaryngology, published Sept. 30, 2026. The authors wrote that, to their knowledge, "only a small number of ectopic pituitary adenomas located in the maxillary sinus have been reported."
