Doctors at 3 important universities – Queen Mary University of London, Barts Hospital and Cambridge University Hospital – have used a special CT scan to find small lumps in the hormone gland that can be removed to cure high blood pressure. It’s estimated that about 1 out of every 20 people with high blood pressure has these lumps.
Recently, some scientists have been able to solve a 60-year old problem about locating certain hormone-producing glands. Before, this was done using a hard and confusing catheter study that was rarely available in hospitals and didn’t always work. With the new research, combining regular urine tests with a scan can help detect people who don’t need to be on any blood pressure medicine anymore after treatment.
Doctors wanted to understand why some people had high blood pressure, so they studied 128 people who had a hormone called aldosterone. From the study, two-thirds were found to have extra of it coming from a harmless lump in one of their adrenal glands. They created a new scan which uses a short-acting radioactive dye that sticks onto this lump. The scan worked just as well as the old one and it was successful with all patients – painless and quick! In the past, doctors could not accurately predict who would be cured of hypertension permanently once they removed the gland, but now with this special scan they can. 18 out of 24 with both ‘hot’ nodule on their scan and urine steroid test had normal blood pressure without taking their medications.
Scientists conducted a research study at various hospitals in the UK, such as Barts Hospital, Cambridge University Hospital, Guy’s and St Thomas’ and universities of Glasgow and Birmingham. The funding for this research was provided by an organisation called National Institute for Health & Care Research, together with other organisations called Barts Charity and British Heart Foundation.
Professor Morris Brown from Queen Mary University of London said that Hypertension can easily be identified when doctors inject a special liquid, then small nodules in the body show up in a CT scan. Until now, those nodules have been overlooked and almost never diagnosed because the tests are hard to do and not always available. However, with this new method, it looks like we might soon be able to detect Hypertension more easily.
The Professor at Queen Mary University of London, William Drake, said this research was the product of many people’s hard work. They worked day and night during the pandemic to do an innovative job. He also said that the research will be in good hands for future projects.
A lot of people with High Blood Pressure (Hypertension) don’t know what is causing it, and they need to take medicine for the rest of their lives. Recent research by experts at Queen Mary University showed that around 5-10% of people have Hypertension because a gene in their adrenal glands isn’t working right. This makes too much of a hormone called Aldosterone release into their body which keeps salt inside, making blood pressure higher. People with a high amount of Aldosterone are hard to cure with normal medicines and could suffer from strokes or heart attacks more than others.
Scientists recently published an article about a new test for diagnosing a medical condition called primary aldosteronism. It’s called ‘[11C]metomidate PET CT’ and it was compared to another common test, ‘adrenal vein sampling’. They ran this study with lots of different people and all the results were put into one big report. The official title of the report is “[11C]metomidate PET-CT versus adrenal vein sampling for diagnosing surgically curable primary aldosteronism: A Prospective, Within-Patient Trial”.
