Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2020 Mar;45(1):18-28.
doi: 10.23736/S0391-1977.18.02780-3. Epub 2018 Feb 13.

A clinical audit: diagnostic and epidemiological evaluation of the adrenal incidentaloma

Affiliations

A clinical audit: diagnostic and epidemiological evaluation of the adrenal incidentaloma

Vincenzo Nuzzo et al. Minerva Endocrinol. 2020 Mar.

Abstract

Background: Audit is a clinical instrument of government characterized by a whole process of evaluation inter pares to improve medical behaviors in the clinical practice. Different endocrinopathies are underestimated in the clinical and diagnostics practice but they can be a real problem in patients admitted in the departments of Internal Medicine. The adrenal incidentaloma is an accidental discovery with an incidence equal to 4% in radiologic studies but it's rarely considereted in the internal disorders. In the departments of Internal Medicine are hospitalized each year approximately 1450,000 patients and 58,000 about them show a surrenalic lesion identified with CT or MRI as Adrenal Incidentaloma.

Methods: Through a search in the radiological archives, were reviewed all abdominal CT performed in the year 2012 in 8 departments of Internal Medicine of 8 Italian public hospitals. They also examined all medical records of these patients to value clinical management of the adrenal masses and the real incidence of the adrenal incidentaloma.

Results: Distribution of pathological results show an important incidence about adrenal incidentaloma in Italian patients although this pathology is represented as a rare disease and its clinical and economic burden are significant. Many questions remain unanswered as the association between duration and severity of the disease, morbidity and how the dimensions affecting it. These results need to be supported by important studies with long follow-up to realize an easy diagnosis.

Conclusions: The results of this audit confirm the real incidence of this pathology in the internistic patients and the final target is to implement changes about therapeutic diagnostic pathway of the hospital patients in the internal medicine departments.

PubMed Disclaimer

Substances

Supplementary concepts

LinkOut - more resources