Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: The performance of medical imaging leads to the incidental discovery of many silent and ignored tumor lesions. The term “adrenal incidentaloma” (AI) is a neologism for an adrenal mass discovered incidentally during an abdominal imaging examination, not motivated by the exploration of adrenal pathology, most of the time asymptomatic. Several authors hypothesize that adrenal adenomas could be a manifestation of the metabolic syndrome and that the prevalence of insulin resistance indicators (diabetes, hypertension, obesity) is high in patients with an adrenal incidentaloma. The aim of this work is to research among our patients with non-secreting adrenal adenoma, abnormalities of markers of metabolic syndrome in order to identify patients at high metabolic and vascular risk, which may prompt us to reconsider the management of these non-functioning tumors.

Material and methods: A prospective and descriptive study of 50 cases of adrenal incidentalomas, including 24 cases of non-secreting adenomas, collected in the endocrinology, Diabetology and Nutrition department of the CHU Mohamed VI of Oujda. The data were collected from the medical records and processed by SPSS V21 software

Results: Non-secreting adenoma represents 48% of AI. The mean age of our patients with non-functional adenoma was 62.4±10.5 years with female predominance (70.8%). Among 24 patients, eight had a BMI>30 kg/m2, a mean waist circumference of 103.8 mm in women and 108.5 mm in men, 11 patients were hypertensive and 6 were diabetic (25%). Fourteen patients had low HDL cholesterol including 5 male and 9 female patients. Moreover, nine patients had elevated triglycerides. Sixty-six percent of patients satisfied the definition of metabolic syndrome according to the IDF 2005 criteria (International Diabetes Federation), including 10 women and 6 men. Regarding cardiovascular risk, according to the recommendations of the European Society of Cardiology, 70.8% of patients were classified at very high risk and 29.2% at high cardiovascular risk.

Discussion/Conclusion: Non-functional adrenal adenomas are often associated with metabolic syndrome which is a major risk factor for cardiovascular or thromboembolic events, hence the need to consider cardiovascular risk in patients with non-secretory adrenal adenoma for optimal management.

Keywords: adrenal incidentaloma, metabolic profile, cardiovascular risk