RESEARCH INTERESTS

The research group of “Molecular Insights to Primary Aldosteronism” consists of a basic scientist and clinical endocrinologists, radiologists, and endocrine surgeons interested in the most common curable form of hypertension, Primary Aldosteronism. Hypertension is a silent killer, affecting 1.3 billion adults worldwide, though less than half are diagnosed and treated. The research of this group has in the past mainly focused on the somatic mutations that can cause unilateral aldosterone-producing adenoma, a surgically curable cause of primary aldosteronism. The interest was especially on the genotype and phenotype relationships as this could help increase the diagnostic rate which is currently estimated to be less than <1%; i.e. 99% of patients with this curable cause of hypertension are not diagnosed and thus inappropriately treated. This is mainly due to the current gold standard of diagnosing this disease is a highly invasive radiological method, adrenal vein sampling, that has a success rate that is dependent on the experience and skill of the radiologist. Thus biomarkers for complete cure of hypertension, both genetics and proteomics, are now being studied in addition to elucidating the mechanism and pathways that regulates zona glomerulosa cell fate, the adrenal zone that physiologically produces aldosterone. The group has a strong international research collaboration ensuring the findings of the research is not only relevant for the Malaysian population, but also replicable in other cohorts. In the future, we hope the research would help to find novel targets to treat hypertension of not only patients with an aldosterone-producing adenoma, but also so called “essential hypertensive” patients, as even non-diseased adrenals are shown to have minute (<2mm) autonomous aldosterone-producing cell clusters (APCC) that cannot be detected by CT-scan.

MEMBERS OF RESEARCH GROUP

RECENT PUBLICATIONS