Gender-specific prolactin thresholds to determine prolactinoma size: a novel Bayesian approach and its clinical utility
Authors: Huber Markus , Luedi Markus M. , Schubert Gerrit A. , Musahl Christian , Tortora Angelo , Frey Janine , Beck Jürgen , Mariani Luigi , Christ Emanuel , Andereggen Lukas 
Published: March 2024

Background

In clinical practice, the size of adenomas is crucial for guiding prolactinoma patients towards the most suitable initial treatment. Consequently, establishing guidelines for serum prolactin level thresholds to assess prolactinoma size is essential. However, the potential impact of gender differences in prolactin levels on estimating adenoma size (micro- vs. macroadenoma) is not yet fully comprehended.

Objective

To introduce a novel statistical method for deriving gender-specific prolactin thresholds to discriminate between micro- and macroadenomas and to assess their clinical utility.

Methods

We present a novel, multilevel Bayesian logistic regression approach to compute observationally constrained gender-specific prolactin thresholds in a large cohort of prolactinoma patients (N = 133) with respect to dichotomized adenoma size. The robustness of the approach is examined with an ensemble machine learning approach (a so-called super learner), where the observed differences in prolactin and adenoma size between female and male patients are preserved and the initial sample size is artificially increased tenfold.

Results

The framework results in a global prolactin threshold of 239.4 μg/L (95% credible interval: 44.0–451.2 μg/L) to discriminate between micro- and macroadenomas. We find evidence of gender-specific prolactin thresholds of 211.6 μg/L (95% credible interval: 29.0–426.2 μg/L) for women and 1,046.1 μg/L (95% credible interval: 582.2–2,325.9 μg/L) for men. Global (that is, gender-independent) thresholds result in a high sensitivity (0.97) and low specificity (0.57) when evaluated among men as most prolactin values are above the global threshold. Applying male-specific thresholds results in a slightly different scenario, with a high specificity (0.99) and moderate sensitivity (0.74). The male-dependent prolactin threshold shows large uncertainty and features some dependency on the choice of priors, in particular for small sample sizes. The augmented datasets demonstrate that future, larger cohorts are likely able to reduce the uncertainty range of the prolactin thresholds.

Conclusions

The proposed framework represents a significant advancement in patient-centered care for treating prolactinoma patients by introducing gender-specific thresholds. These thresholds enable tailored treatment strategies by distinguishing between micro- and macroadenomas based on gender. Specifically, in men, a negative diagnosis using a universal prolactin threshold can effectively rule out a macroadenoma, while a positive diagnosis using a male-specific prolactin threshold can indicate its presence. However, the clinical utility of a female-specific prolactin threshold in our cohort is limited. This framework can be easily adapted to various biomedical settings with two subgroups having imbalanced average biomarkers and outcomes of interest. Using machine learning techniques to expand the dataset while preserving significant observed imbalances presents a valuable method for assessing the reliability of gender-specific threshold estimates. However, external cohorts are necessary to thoroughly validate our thresholds.