Will Scans Help Boost Detection of Resistant Hypertension?
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A noninvasive imaging method for identifying whether the source of a patient's primary aldosteronism is from unilateral or bilateral adrenal adenomas worked as well as the standard method, invasive adrenal vein sampling, in a head-to-head comparison with 143 patients. The findings establish that the imaging technique, which radioactively tags aldosterone-producing tissue with the marker 11C-metomidate followed by PET-CT imaging is just as good as adrenal vein sampling (AVS), declared Xilin Wu, MBBS, during a presentation at the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society. This noninvasive alternative, which also does not require the substantial technical expertise that AVS demands, should make assessment of adenoma laterality in patients with primary aldosteronism (PA) much more widely available and accessible, predicted Wu, a researcher at Queen Mary University of London.
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@dhara It will allow more places to do this, and I think it will definitely allow more patients to be diagnosed with PA from a unilateral source. AVS is a real bottleneck. Creating new diagnostic options for patients with PA and potentially increasing the number of these patients who are surgical candidates is the aim of this study. Patients with PA develop a curable form of hypertension if their excess aldosterone can be neutralized with a mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist (MRA), or even more definitively by surgical removal of the adrenal aldosteronoma generating the hormonal excess as long as the adenoma is unilateral. Conventional imaging of the adrenals with CT or MRI has proven unreliable for identifying adrenal nodules noninvasively, which has made the invasive and technically challenging standard option of AVS the only game in town.