Endocrine Abstracts

Objective: Endogenous cushing syndrome (ECS) is a complex and rare disease. After treatment, 50% of cases have recurrence. The objective is to evaluate the prevalence of recurrences in patients diagnosed of ECS and its predictive factors.

Materials and Methods: Analytical retrospective observational study with 19 ECS diagnoses cases followed-up from January 1999 to December 2023. Demographic (sex, age), clinical (cause, face plethora, fragile capillary, reddish-purple stretch marks, high blood pressure, diabetes mellitus, obesity, osteoporosis) and biochemical (plasma cortisol (PC), nocturnal salivary cortisol (NSC), urinary free cortisol (UFC) before treatment) variables were collected, and recurrence frequency and relationship with the previously mentioned variables. The statistical analysis was performed with the IBM SPSS v.25 program (Statistical significance P<0.05).

Results: 19 patients were analyzed, 16 females and 3 males. Mean age 41±10.8 years. ECS’s cause was 52.6% cushing’s disease, 36.8% adrenal cause and 10.5% ectopic cause. The 89.5% of the cases had high blood pressure, 73.7% facial plethora, 57.9% capillary fragility and obesity and 52.6% reddish-purple stretch marks. Diabetes mellitus was observed in 36.8% and osteoporosis in 26.3%.

Conclusions: In our study, there’s a recurrence of 42.1% of the cases, most frequently in those of pituitary origin. Despite observing a similar percentage in clinical variables, the means of the biochemical variables before treatment are higher in those patients who presented recurrence, although these differences were not statistically significant, probably related to the presence of a small sample size. This increases the possible usefulness of this variables as predictors of disease recurrence.