High blood pressure in young people should be alerted to adrenal tumors

  Recently, a dozen of young patients with adrenal adenoma were seen in the hospital, all of them had very high risk of hypertension, one of them even had a brain hemorrhage due to high blood pressure and nearly lost his life, and another one had a high blood pressure causing aortic coarctation, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The cause of hypertension turned out to be adrenal adenoma, a tumor that can secrete a substance that causes increased blood pressure. Therefore, young people with high blood pressure should be alert to adrenal adenomas.  Adrenal adenoma mainly includes pheochromocytoma and primary aldosteronism. Pheochromocytoma releases a substance called catecholamine in large quantities, which causes vasoconstriction and persistent hypertension. Primary aldosteronism is a condition in which hypertension is caused by excessive secretion of aldosterone from the adrenal cortex. Many young people develop hypertension but have no clinical symptoms because young people are more tolerant and gradually adapt to the continuous increase in hypertension, and once medication is taken, the body is unable to adapt to the drop in blood pressure, so it is often overlooked by patients. If there is no intervention for a long time, or in the case of physical fatigue, emotional stress, and increased work pressure, blood pressure will become higher and higher, leading to cerebral hemorrhage, cardiac arrest, hypokalemia, and other critical conditions due to blood vessel rupture.  Therefore, in young people with repeatedly high hypertension, the first thing to consider is hypertension caused by adrenal adenoma when family history and primary hypertension are excluded. The diagnostic result can be clear through CT examination and endocrine examination. At present, the surgical removal of adrenal adenoma is mainly performed by laparoscopic technique, which is less traumatic, will not recur and has good prognosis.