PhD: Adrenal Tumors - Causes and Consequences

The detection of adrenal tumors has increased dramatically in recent years. Current guidelines on how to handle these patients rely on outdated and biased data on prevalence and presentation. The overall aim of the PhD project is to achieve new insights in and updated understanding of adrenal tumors in regards to clinical presentation, incidence, prevalence and prognosis based on high quality population-based data. The specific aims are:
1) To determine incidence and prevalence of adrenal tumors, both hormonally active, hormonally in-active and malignant tumors.
2) To determine differences in clinical presentation between adrenal tumors in terms of symptoms, radiological characteristics and patient demographics.
3) To determine morbidity and mortality for patients with both hormonally active and inactive adren-al tumors.
Data on prevalence and presentation of the different adrenal tumors will enable clinicians to better distinguish between patients with clinically insignificant benign and hormonally inactive adrenal tumors and those with the potentially fatal hormonally active and malignant tumors. The results of this project will address the increasing clinical challenge of incidentally found adrenal tumors and help clinicians to identi-fy patients who will benefit from adrenalectomy. In addition, the project will establish a large cohort of patients with adrenal tumors, thereby enabling future studies in tumor biology, genetics and new prognostic factors.