Nighttime hormone bursts explain missed hypertension cases — SkimNews
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- University of Bristol and University of Manchester researchers, with collaborators in Bergen, Stockholm, and Athens, tracked 60 patients across those four cities over 24 hours using a wearable device called U-RHYTHM that samples hormones from the skin every 20 minutes while patients go about normal life, including sleeping.
- The study, published in Science Translational Medicine, found that primary aldosteronism patients experience bursts of aldosterone production both during the day and at night, with the nighttime surges especially pronounced in those whose condition stemmed from a problem in just one adrenal gland.
- Routine blood tests miss the disorder because aldosterone does not stay consistently elevated — even in some of the most severe cases, hormone levels sometimes dropped below the minimum thresholds used to diagnose the condition during a single time-point draw.
- Surgical removal of the affected adrenal gland caused the unusual nighttime hormone bursts to disappear, providing direct evidence that the surges originated in the diseased gland and were a signature of the disorder itself.
- Primary aldosteronism may affect up to one in five people with high blood pressure and is linked to elevated risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes; study co-lead Dr. Thomas Upton said it could be affecting millions in the UK yet is frequently never diagnosed.
- The U-RHYTHM technology, invented at Bristol by Prof Stafford Lightman, was adopted and further developed by spinout company Dynamic Therapeutics in 2023; the researchers suggest future diagnosis could shift from single blood samples to continuous hormone rhythm tracking, particularly overnight patterns.
Why it matters: Up to one in five hypertension patients may have a treatable or surgically curable hormone disorder that standard blood tests cannot catch because aldosterone spikes intermittently, especially overnight. Moving from single time-point blood draws to continuous wearable hormone monitoring could enable earlier detection of a condition the Endocrine Society says should be screened in all hypertensive patients — potentially preventing downstream heart disease, strokes, and diabetes.
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