April 8th is Cushing’s Awareness Day. This day has been chosen as a day of awareness as it is the birthday of Dr. Harvey Cushing, a neurosurgeon, who discovered this illness.

Cushing’s disease is a rare hormone disease caused by prolonged exposure to high levels of the stress hormonecortisol in the blood, whereas Addison’s disease is caused by the opposite: the lack of cortisol. For more background information on both see this previous post. Ramona Bates MD, of Suture for a Living, has written an excellent review (in plain language) about Cushing’s Disease on occasion of Cushing Awareness Day at EmaxHealth.

From this you can learn that Cushing’s disease can be due to the patient taking cortisol-like glucocorticoids, such as prednisone for asthma (exogenous cause), but can also arise because people’s bodies make too much of cortisol itself.  This may be due to a…