Parathyroid Gland Disorders

Hyperparathyroidism develops when the parathyroid produces too much PTH. Too much PTH causes your blood calcium to increase and your urine to excrete too much calcium, which can put you at risk for bone fractures and kidney stones.

There are two types of hyperparathyroidism:

• Primary hyperparathyroidism, which results from one or more enlarged parathyroid glands
• Secondary hyperparathyroidism, which results from a calcium or vitamin D deficiency. This is frequently seen in patients with chronic renal disease

MedStar Health offers you a highly skilled, experienced, and dedicated team of endocrinologists.

We believe you benefit most from a multidisciplinary approach in which we collaborate on your treatment with your other doctors and specialists. We all use the same computer system, known as an electronic health record (EHR), to promote easy communication and access to the information we need to coordinate your care and monitor your condition.

To care for hyperparathyroidism, we first evaluate the severity of your symptoms and determine the underlying cause of your disease.

For some, hyperparathyroidism does not cause significant symptoms. Usually in those cases, we will simply monitor your condition closely.

In more severe cases, we may prescribe medication and/or recommend surgical removal of the affected parathyroid glands. We always follow up on your condition with careful monitoring.

Our endocrine surgeons typically perform this surgery as an outpatient procedure using minimally invasive techniques with intraoperative parathyroid hormone monitoring. Intraoperative hormone monitoring allows your surgeon to test your parathyroid level during the operation and determine if there are additional glands that should be evaluated.