Hypercalcemia in MRCP(II)

Hypercalcemia in MRCP (II)

It has been almost 3 years ago when I last talked about hypercalcemia. I mentioned about common causes of hypercalcemia in my previous post. Today, I am going to talk about managing hypercalcemia in clinical practice.

Before this, I think we have to pick up hypercalcemia in daily clinical practice, although I would say most of the time, patients are asymptomatic, you must remember that classically, hypercalcemia leads to,

" groans, moans,bones,stones and psychiatric overtones"

However, I usually noticed they came in unspecific complaints- lethargy,fatigue but quite common they are dehydrated and developed acute kidney injury ( hypercalcemia is one of the major causes of nephrogenic diabetes insipidus and patients with hypercalcemia develop acute kidney injury may be due to dehydration and other factors as well- You may want to find out how hypercalcemia can lead to AKI)

Pamidronate- A bisphosphonate

I always remind my junior doctors that strategies to manage hypercalcemia are
1) To correct hypercalcemia
2) To find out the underlying cause

Various ways to reduce hypercalcemia, they are hydration, steroid, bisphosphonates and calcitonin and of course after treating the hypercalcemia, find out the underlying cause.

I would say that commonly I find that the major causes are either primary tumour ( especially multiple myeloma) or secondary malignancy due to metastasis to the bone!