Limited diagnostic utility of partially successful adrenal vein sampling for primary aldosteronism subtyping

Introduction: Failure of adrenal vein sampling (AVS) due to difficult cannulation of the right adrenal vein (AV) frequently precludes sub-typing of patients with primary aldosteronism (PA) before adrenalectomy. According to a recent study, lateralized PA could be accurately predicted from partial AVS data based on the gradient of the aldosterone-to-cortisol ratios (ACR) between left AV and inferior vena cava (IVC) (LAV/IVC index). We aimed to validate the diagnostic utility of this index for PA subtyping in our cohort. Material and methods: A retrospective cross-sectional study included all patients who underwent bilaterally successful AVS at our centre and were diagnosed with either bilateral PA according to AVS or with lateralized PA after successful adrenalectomy from November 2004 to the end of 2019. Final diagnoses were compared to originally suggested LAV/IVC index cut-offs of >= 5.5 for ipsilateral disease and of = 5.5 or = 5.5), 4 out of 16 patients (25%) would have been incorrectly sent to left adrenalectomy. Inappropriate right adrenalectomy would have occurred in 7 out of 21 patients (33.3%) when predicting contralateral disease (LAV/IVC index of