Adrenal incidentoma

Abstract

Accidentally detected adrenal tumors, or the so-called incidentalomas or adrenalomas (from incidentally discovered adrenal mass), are a relatively new and insufficiently studied problem of endocrinology and endocrine surgery [18, 25, 43, 48, 56]. Issues related to the etiology, morphogenesis, diagnosis and tactics of treatment with incidental have been little studied and are not consolidated into a single integrated system. Several years ago in the periodical press there were few works devoted to this problem [18, 48], and the corresponding sections in the special manuals were extremely short or absent. For many years, hormone-inactive adrenal tumors were, as a rule, an accidental sectional finding [24, 32, 38, 53]. Only with the introduction into wide clinical practice of highly effective diagnostic technologies (ultrasound - ultrasound, computed tomography - CT, magnetic resonance imaging - MRI, selective angiography, etc.) did real possibilities for intravital diagnosis of these tumors appear, as evidenced by the steadily increasing number of publications [ 18, 19, 41, 48, 53, 58, 82]. However, at present, in most cases, incidentalomas are detected by chance during a comprehensive study of the abdominal organs, carried out for some other reason, not related to the pathology of the adrenal glands. Thus, most authors use the term “incidentaloma” to refer to an accidentally detected adrenal tumor [20, 22, 30, 41, 48, 53, 58].