When my mom was about fifty, she developed high blood pressure. For the next five years she would get migraines when she attempted to exercise or anytime her heart rate increased for just a few minutes. This didn't make sense because she had eaten healthy her entire life and lived an active lifestyle, in fact, she competed in triathlons well into her forties. However, she has a demanding career, tries to do everything for everyone and has many dangerous hobbies. Once during a standard checkup, her doctor wanted to rush her to the emergency room for high blood pressure but my mom explained it was typical to have blood pressure that high. It was on average around 200/120.
My mom had seen over ten specialists including a neurologist (twice), pulmonologist, cardiologist, primary physician, two physician assistants, alternative medicine doctor, and many more. Everyone she saw assumed it must be her heart that was causing high blood pressure so they would recommend a different type of blood pressure medication or increase her existing dosage. At a party, my mom happened to start talking with an endocrinologist. He recommended getting a scan of her adrenal glands and sure enough, she had a tumor on her right adrenal gland. The surgeon planned to remove only the tumor if possible but ended up removing the entire gland due to risk factors. The surgeon said humans can live with less than half of a normal adrenal gland. It has been more than two years since her surgery and her health has returned to normal (knock on wood).
Even though a person might have symptoms that point to an issue in their circulatory system, the real problem might be occurring in a different system, making it harder to pinpoint the exact issue. Therefore, even the best and most specialized doctors might miss details in a patient’s presenting symptoms resulting in the wrong diagnoses.
Not only did my mom’s physician never recommended seeing an endocrinologist over the course of five years, she used my mom’s case in front of other doctors falsely claiming she caught the rare situation. I believe it would have been more ethical to admit she never landed on the correct diagnosis.
There was also a chiropractor my mom was visiting who claimed she could heal my mom. I think chiropractors are amazing but, in this case, making false claims only prolonged finding the correct diagnosis.
If an individual has received a diagnosis that isn’t fixing their problem, they should consider exploring other options. Such as, get more testing done, search the internet, talk to people, use apps that give the most likely diagnoses or keep meeting with health specialists.
Hey Tera,
ReplyDeleteThank you for the interesting read. I am glad your mom is doing better!
I was intrigued by the connection between the adrenal gland and the heart and after some digging I stumbled upon a review that explains that adrenal insufficiency (AI) is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease (Rahvar et al., 2017)! Crazy right? So I wanted to figure out why.
Interestingly, one article that I stumbled upon deemed AI treatment as the main cause for this increased risk… not the actual insufficiency itself. Another article explained the possible reason why AI itself increased an individual’s risk for cardiac events.
Adrenal insufficiency is a disease characterized by the inability to secrete glucocorticoids (such as cortisol) well. To treat this, many practitioners use what is called a replacement regimen, consisting of hydrocortisone or cortisone acetate administered daily (Esposito, et al., 2020).
With the two articles I found, two theories have been proposed as to why AI increases the risk of cardiac events. The first posits that the glucocorticoid replacement therapy leads to imbalances in blood cortisol which may cause adverse cardiac issues (Rahvar et al., 2017). The second posits that decreased blood levels of cortisol (which is what happens with AI) leads to compensation of inflammatory mediators which have been associated with increased risk for cardiovascular issues (Rahvar et al., 2017 and Esposito et al., 2020).
Given these theories, it is completely understandable that a tumor could cause cardiac issues!
Esposito, D., Bobbio, E., Di Fraia, R., Mone, P., Accardo, G., De Bellis, A., Iorio, S., Esposito, K., Marfella, R., Johannsson, G., Ragnarsson, O., & Pasquali, D. (2020). Patients with adrenal insufficiency have cardiovascular features associated with hypovolemia. Endocrine, 70(2), 412–420. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12020-020-02458-3
Rahvar, A. H., Haas, C. S., Danneberg, S., & Harbeck, B. (2017). Increased Cardiovascular Risk in Patients with Adrenal Insufficiency: A Short Review. BioMed research international, 2017, 3691913. https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/3691913