Discordance and shortcomings of aldosterone suppression tests in primary aldosteronism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The saline suppression test (SST) and the captopril challenge test (CCT) have traditionally been used to confirm or exclude primary aldosteronism (PA). New guidelines recommend using these tests to predict the likelihood of unilateral PA. This study evaluated the diagnostic accuracy, consistency, and clinical implications of these tests. METHODS: We conducted a retrospective study of 531 patients with high-probability features of PA who underwent both SST and CCT to evaluate their accuracy and ability to predict unilateral PA. Adrenal lateralization and surgical treatment decisions were guided by individualized clinical judgment rather than strictly relying on SST/CCT results. RESULTS: The rate of PA diagnosis ranged from 47.8% to 97.2% based on SST and CCT criteria. Discordance rates between SST and CCT ranged from 10.9% to 51.6%. In analyses restricted to only patients with clinically overt PA, where suppression testing is not considered necessary, the positivity rates of the SST and CCT were still suboptimal and test discordance persisted. Among patients with lateralizing PA, 6.6% to 27.9% had either a negative SST or CCT interpretation, and among those who achieved Primary Aldosteronism Surgical Outcome-defined biochemical cure after unilateral adrenalectomy, 4.1% to 39.8% had either a negative SST or CCT, and up to 5.1% had false-negative results on both tests. CONCLUSIONS: Well-established aldosterone suppression tests for PA demonstrated substantial inconsistency, false-negative interpretations, and the inability to reliably predict lateralization outcomes in PA. Aldosterone suppression testing, using SST and CCT, lack accuracy for the diagnosis and subtyping of PA in high-risk patients.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".