Long-Term Effects of Prior Cushing’s Syndrome

Cushing’s syndrome, and its most frequent cause pituitary-dependent Cushing’s disease, is a rare disease due to excessive glucocorticoid (GC) secretion. Chronic exposure to GC excess determines a large number of deleterious effects leading to increased morbidity (i.e., cardiovascular complications, psychiatric symptoms, osteoporosis, cognitive impairment, hormonal dysfunctions after surgery) and mortality. Although most of these effects improve after normalization of cortisol, not all are completely reversible after remission of hypercortisolism and negatively impact on health-related quality of life. Therefore, there is a need for both greater diagnostic suspicion and improved diagnostic tools to hasten the delay to diagnosis and effective therapy aimed at improving long-term prognosis. The lack of systematic data analysis and prospective longitudinal studies is due to low prevalence and orphan disease status of CS. Multicenter registries collecting longitudinal data on these patients would contribute to further knowledge on the natural history and long-term outcome data in these patients.