High blood pressure affects millions of people around the world and is one of the biggest causes of heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, and early death.
Many people can control it with healthy habits and medicine, but for some people the real cause is hidden deep inside the body. Researchers from Queen Mary University of London and several other institutions have now developed a new type of CT scan that could help doctors find one of these hidden causes.
The research was published in the journal Nature Medicine and offers new hope for people whose high blood pressure is caused by a tiny growth in an adrenal gland.
The adrenal glands are two small glands that sit above the kidneys. They make hormones that help control blood pressure, stress, and the balance of salt and water in the body. One important hormone is called aldosterone.
It tells the kidneys how much salt and water to keep. When too much aldosterone is made, the body keeps extra salt and water. This raises blood pressure and can increase the risk of serious health problems over time.
For more than sixty years, doctors have known that some people develop very small, non-cancerous nodules in one adrenal gland that make too much aldosterone.
These nodules are believed to affect about one in every twenty people with high blood pressure. Even though the condition is not rare, it has been very difficult to diagnose because the nodules are often so small that normal scans cannot see them clearly.
Until now, the main way to find the problem was a difficult procedure called adrenal vein sampling. Doctors place a thin catheter into veins near each adrenal gland and compare hormone levels from both sides.
This test needs highly trained specialists, is only offered in a limited number of hospitals, can be uncomfortable, and sometimes does not give a clear answer.
In the new study, scientists tested a different approach in 128 people whose high blood pressure was linked to excess aldosterone. They used a special CT scan together with a short-lasting radioactive dye called metomidate.
The dye collects in the hormone-producing tissue for a brief time, making the tiny nodule shine brightly on the scan. This allows doctors to see exactly which adrenal gland is producing too much hormone.
The results were encouraging. The scan found a small hormone-producing nodule in about two-thirds of the patients. The scan successfully worked in every participant, giving doctors a fast and non-invasive way to locate the problem. Many of these nodules were so tiny that they would probably have been missed with standard imaging tests.
The researchers also combined the scan with a simple urine steroid test. Together, these two tests helped identify the patients most likely to benefit from surgery.
When only one adrenal gland contains the overactive nodule, doctors can remove that gland. After surgery, some people may no longer need blood pressure medicine, while others may need fewer medicines and achieve much better blood pressure control.
This discovery could have an important effect on healthcare. High blood pressure often has no warning signs, yet it slowly damages blood vessels and vital organs. Finding people whose condition has a treatable hormonal cause could reduce years of medicine, lower the risk of heart attacks and strokes, and improve quality of life.
The researchers say larger studies are still needed before the new scan becomes widely available. Even so, the early findings are very promising and suggest that many patients who are currently undiagnosed could finally receive the right treatment. The study was led by Professor Morris Brown and published in Nature Medicine.
If you care about high blood pressure, please read studies that drinking tea could help lower blood pressure, and early time-restricted eating could help improve blood pressure.
For more health information, please see recent studies about added sugar in your diet linked to higher blood pressure, and results showing vitamin D could improve blood pressure in people with diabetes.
Copyright © 2026 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.
