Adrenal Artery Ablation for Uncontrolled Hypertension

The activation of the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system (RAAS) plays a key role in uncontrolled hypertension or resistant hypertension. Surgery and and medicine are the main treatment for primary aldosteronism(PA) by the current guidelines. However, only a small part of patients with PA meet the surgical criteria, and most of patients with uncontrolled hypertension and activation of RAAS have to take spironolactone or other antihypertensive drugs for long time. On the other side, long-term inhibition of aldosterone receptor may cause hyperkalemia, male breast hyperplasia and other adverse reactions. Moreover, hyperaldosterone is still not corrected by spironolactone, which causes extensive cerebrovascular damages even though blood pressure and blood potassium had been normalized. With the development of adrenal vein sampling and adrenal ablation, selective arterial ablation of adrenal gland(AAA) was observed with significant decrease of blood aldosterone and blood pressure in patients with PA, which made it promising that uncontrolled hypertension could be relieved by selective AAA.