Surgical Approach to the Adrenal Glands

Abstract

Any surgeon treating a patient with adrenal disease should be a member of a multi-disciplinary team involving dedicated specialists, including an endocrinologist, anaesthetist, radiologist, intensivist and geneticist. In an era of epidemic numbers of adrenal incidentalomas, great care must be taken to determine not only the endocrine diagnosis, but also the benefits (if any) of adrenal surgery. Finally, the surgeon must be competent in both minimally invasive and gross resectional surgical techniques and know when to adopt these two very different surgical approaches.