Changing Profile of Primary Hyperparathyroidism Over Two and Half Decades: A Study in Tertiary Referral Center of North India

Abstract

Background: Most of the cases of PHPT in developing countries present in symptomatic stage, some even in very advanced stage but in recent years the trend seems to be changing. This has been corroborated from few recently published literature from developing countries. The scope of this study is to further carry out an in-depth analysis of various clinical and biochemical parameters of PHPT patients at a tertiary care center of northern India.

Methods: In this retrospective analysis, a total of 333 patients with PHPT from the year 1990 to 2016 were studied. The study population was divided into three subgroups based on the time span; 1990-1999 (n = 34), 2000-2009 (n = 112), 2010-2016 (n = 187), and clinical and biochemical parameters were compared.

Results: The clinical presentation has evolved progressively with increase in older age group (35 vs 39 vs 43.85, p < 0.001), less patients with musculoskeletal symptoms (85.3 vs 76.8 vs 61%, p = 0.002) and less patients with severe bone disease (29.4 vs 10.7 vs 10.7%, p = 0.088). Biochemical parameters also showed a changing trend with significant decrease in mean S. Alkaline phosphatase (1393 vs 965 vs 414.8 IU/L, p < 0.001) and S. iPTH (837.52 vs 812.89 vs 635.74 pg/mL, p = 0.02). Vitamin D nutrition status is still suboptimal but shows improvement, and more patients are insufficient as compared to previous deficient state (mean S. Vitamin D-10.31 vs 16.16 vs 25.30 ng/mL, p < 0.001).

Conclusions: Our study reveals a change in trend in PHPT which is similar to evolution of this disease in western population and positively corroborated with observations from China, Hong Kong and Turkey.