The Association of Hypertension With Suprarenal Tumors

That tumors of the suprarenal gland may be associated with hypertension was first pointed out by Edmund Neusser.1He observed two patients in whom the condition ran the typical clinical course of nephritis with hypertension, but at necropsy the kidneys and arteries were found not affected, the pathologic finding in each instance being a neoplasm of the suprarenal gland, described as a carcinoma by Neusser. These observations attracted little attention till Vaquez,2influenced by Josué's discovery of the vascular lesions produced by epinephrin, formulated the doctrine that arterial hypertension is due to hyperepinephrinemia. It was shown that diffuse hyperplasia and circumscribed adenoma formation in the suprarenal cortex are exceedingly common in persons suffering from hypertension, whether it is nephritic or what is now termed "essential" hypertension. Thus, Aubertin and Ambard3found that out of eight cases of hypertension four showed diffuse cortical hyperplasia and three others adenomas of the suprarenal