Rapid advances in the field of PA is coming mostly from basic scientific research in molecular biology and genetics but more recently also in the form of new ideas about functional imaging and novel therapeutic interventions in this condition[1, 16–18, 20]. These concepts are now moving from the bench to the bedsides of our patients and are being assessed prospectively in clinical trials, but it will be some time before their impact on clinical practice is known[16, 17]. While speeding down the lane of progress we should not lose the sight of milestones already reached as they will help us to judge benefits of new inventions. Our study, which presents short- and long-term outcomes of adrenalectomy in patient with PA in a single centre over the last 24 years, contribute to the current debate about PA by providing such a rear mirror view.
Firstly, one might consider that only 82 adrenalectomies for PA performed over a 24 year period in a tertiary centre is a relatively limited number of cases given the predicated prevalence. To our knowledge, low number of adrenalectomies for PA is not particular to our centre but universal and common experience both in UK and Abroad [21]. As predicted by J.W. Conn in 1955, around 10% of hypertensive patients have PA but the reality is that we are only diagnosing and operating on about 1% of patients with this condition. Clearly case identification needs to increase which will be achieved by improving awareness amongst patients and doctors but also by simplifying the current diagnostic pathways.
Secondly, our paper describes a pragmatic approach to localisation for surgical management which was used during the study period. The pivotal investigation in our localisation strategy was CT or MRI to identify adrenal nodules. Patients with convincing biochemistry and clear unilateral nodules were offered surgery, especially if young. Patients with bilateral nodules or over 35 years of age were tested further with a combination of AVS and functional imaging. Since this approach did not offer AVS routinely but selectively, it is interesting to compare outcomes to other studies where AVS utilised more comprehensively
Overall cure rate in such studies published in the past, which took into account biochemical and clinical outcomes, have typically been reported to vary between 32% − 47%[1, 6, 14, 21, 22]. More recent PASO study showed complete, partial or absent biochemical and clinical success in 94%, 4%, 2% and 37%, 47%, 16% of patients respectively [6]. This study concludes that biochemical and clinical benefit was observed in 98% and 84% of patients. In a MATCH study complete biochemical and clinical success was achieved in 88% and 31% of patients respectively[16].
In our study outcomes at 3 months for the whole cohort of 82 patients showed that hypokalaemia was cured in all patients and statistically significant reduction in blood pressure was achieved. Short term results in 24 patients with long term follow up available showed that all but one patient achieved statistically significant decrease of aldosterone levels, normalisation of ARR, improvement in blood pressure and reduction of medications were observed. At three months complete biochemical success was achieved in 95.8% and complete and partial clinical success in 29.2% and 58.35%, suggesting clinical benefit in 87.55% of our patients. What is remarkable is that these benefits were sustained or even improved at 5 years and only patients who were not cured at three months remained so at 5 years. All patients cured biochemically and clinically in short term remained cured at 5 years. Clinical benefit in long term remained the same as in short term (87.5%) but more patients achieved complete cure (41.7%), perhaps reflecting the need for long term follow up as blood pressure improves and medications reduced.
What are the possible explanations that our outcomes are not inferior to results from series where routine AVS was used?
Perhaps it is the fact that AVS is less than perfect “gold standard” in predicting cure. Spartacus study found no difference in cure rate whether AVS was used or not, although was criticised for its design and underpower [23]. Recently published MATCH study shown that AVS predicted biochemical and clinical cure with 63.3% and 61.5% accuracy[16]. Metomidate was just marginally with accuracy of 72,7% and 65.4%. CT and AVS discrepancy are known to vary from 30–40% but does that always mean that patients who have not met strict criteria for lateralisation (LI > 4) and are not offered surgery would not have benefited? Published evidence on unilateral adrenalectomy in patients with known bilateral PA suggest otherwise, as they reveal biochemical and clinical benefit of what is known as debulking effect and some of our patients might have benefited from it [24].
It is also likely that our good outcomes were the results of stratification based on presence of radiologically obvious and sizable adrenal nodules. Recent studies showed that patients with classic histopathology who form adenomas, are more likely to have unilateral disease and are associated with better chances of cure if adrenalectomy is performed[25, 26]. Non classical histopathology associated with hyperplasia and formation of APMs (formerly APCC) which are not visible on CT, tend to be bilateral and are less likely to be cured by unilateral adrenalectomy[25, 26].
The fact that in our series 76 (93%) patients had sizable adenomas and only 6 had hyperplasia would suggest that our population was artificially enriched by this kind of selection choosing patients who were more likely to be cured. Future studies into somatic mutations responsible for formation of either radiologically detectable or “invisible” adenomas and APMs will help to clarify aetiology of these distinct forms of the PA.
It is also known that results are better in women and younger people but sex and age distribution in our study does not explain that and neither does ethnic mix.
Thirdly, our results strongly confirm that unilateral adrenalectomy is currently the gold standard therapy for patients with PA. There is consensus that in comparison to medical therapy, adrenalectomy offers better management of hypertension, hypokalaemia, and left ventricular hypertrophy [21]. Present series concurred with the introduction of laparoscopic adrenalectomy in our centre, one of the first in the UK. Some open adrenalectomies were performed during transitional period but most operations were laparoscopic procedures with only one conversion. Low complication rate confirmed a safe profile for the laparoscopic approach and the associated short post-operative stay (shorter recently) contributes to its cost-effectiveness[27, 28]. New approaches, such as partial adrenalectomy or ablative techniques using extreme temperatures causing freezing or boiling of adrenal tissue, carry significant risk of not achieving cure in first place or early recurrence of PA[18].
Ablative approaches also have very high cost (catheters, probes), take long time, are associated with increase in radiation, requirement for general anaesthetics and are not currently performed as a day cases, so they might not be cost effective at all.
We acknowledge that the present study has certain limitations. The retrospective design could have affected accuracy of collected data especially as it was carried over a long period of time. Availability of long term follow up data in only a third of our patients is also a limitation
In summary, our single centre results showed that good biochemical and clinical outcomes in patients with PA were achieved in the past 24 years period, coinciding with the switch to laparoscopic adrenalectomy. These good results were almost certainly due to a highly selected population of patients with PA with sizable and radiologically visible adrenal nodules, who were more likely to benefit from adrenalectomy, even if AVS was used selectively rather than routinely. Future developments should focus on identifying the vast majority of subjects with PA who are not currently diagnosed or offered surgery. The current existing pathway for screening, confirming and localising disease are complex, time consuming and inconvenient. AVS, which is sixty years old and one of the oldest procedures still performed by interventional radiologists, is unlikely to be perfected any further and new solutions are needed.
Novel molecular imaging of the adrenal glands could provide a solution with the potential to reshape the scientific and clinical landscape of Primary Aldosteronism. Cholesterol imaging used in the past had very limited accuracy and Metomidate and its derivatives has well known limitations due to its non-selectivity for enzymes involved in aldosterone pathway and difficulty with isotope production15. However, recent research involving tracers based on highly selective aldosterone synthase blockers, showed that such tracers could reliably detect not only adenomas but also aldosterone producing microadenomas (APMs) in human adrenals both in vitro and in vivo17. Perhaps imaging based on this technology could shorten diagnostic pathway by making confirmatory step unnecessary and merge subtyping investigations into a single scan. Such transformation of PA diagnostic pathway should improve accuracy of diagnosis, efficiency of stratification for surgery and would be beneficial to patients in the future.