Hypertension can be cured by microinvasive surgery, study claims

January 17, 2023  11:56

Hypertension can be cured by microinvasive surgery on the adrenal glands in some patients, said scientists from Queen Mary University of London.

Hypertension is a syndrome of chronically high blood pressure. This state of the body is considered dangerous, and doctors prescribe special medicines to reduce the pressure.

Specialists at Queen Mary University of London and their colleagues have come up with a simple way to diagnose one of the causes of hypertension and eliminate it. The doctors combined computed tomography and urine analysis and examined 128 people in this way. All of them had hypertension caused by elevated levels of the steroid hormone aldosterone. Aldosterone causes salt to linger in the body, raising blood pressure.

However, CT scans and tests have shown that in 2/3 of them, a benign nodule in one of the adrenal glands is responsible for the increased hormone production. The scan uses a very short-acting dose of methomidate, a radioactive "dye" that sticks only to the node that produces aldosterone. It increases its visibility on the CT scan and allows for an accurate diagnosis. Previously, doctors had to perform medical surgery even to detect this problem, and this surgery did not guarantee accuracy.

Once the problem is detected, these nodes can be safely removed through microinvasive surgery. According to doctors, a mutation associated with increased production of aldosterone by the adrenal glands occurs in 5-10% of people.

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