Adrenal tumors and cancers may require more than one type of treatment from more than one type of physician. At Roswell Park, your care team includes physicians from several medical specialties, including urologists, medical oncologists, pathologists, endocrinologists and other specialists, who collaborate to determine the best very best treatment plan for you.
Your personal treatment plan may include one or more of the following treatment approaches.
- Observation. For some patients with benign tumors that do not cause problematic symptoms, the best course of action is no treatment, or observation. Instead, experts will monitor your condition and only recommend treatment if the tumor grows too large, begins to affect your hormone levels, or becomes malignant.
- Surgery to remove the adrenal gland containing the tumor
- Medical therapy, which uses drugs that circulate through your body to kill cancer cells. This type of treatment may include chemotherapy, targeted therapy and immunotherapy.
- Radiation therapy to kill cancer cells by directing high energy radiation at specific areas
- Somatostatin analogs. These are drugs that can slow down or stop the production of hormones in the body.
- Blood pressure medications. Certain blood pressure medications may be necessary to take, at least temporarily, if the adrenal tumor is overproducing adrenaline-type hormones