Adrenal incidentalomas are adrenal masses
detected on imaging performed for reasons other than suspected adrenal disease.
In most cases, adrenal incidentalomas are nonfunctioning adrenocortical
adenomas but may also require therapeutic intervention including that for
adrenocortical carcinoma, pheochromocytoma, hormone-producing adenoma, or
metastases, (1). In recent years,
several studies have investigated steroid
profiling as a tool to discriminate benign
from malignant adrenal tumors, (2). For the differentiation
of malignant from benign adrenal tumors there are still 3 main imaging techniques in mainstream
clinical use: CT, MRI, and Pet/CT, (3 &4). The conservative treatments for the group
of patients ranged from pharmacotherapeutic interventions for comorbidities to watchful waiting only were studied. The quality of evidence
from these cohort studies is low to
very low, mainly due to confounding and
the lack of a standardized protocol, (5). Etiology of adrenal tumors
presented as adrenal incidentaloma, is summarized in table 1. Minimally invasive
surgery was comparable to open surgery in most of the studies, (6).