Parathyroid gland

Abstract

The last organ to be recognized in man, the parathyroid glands, was discovered in 1880 by Ivar Sandstrom, a Swedish medical student. The discovery attracted little attention initially. Later, with the uncovering of the relationship of the glands to signifi cant bone disease, interest quickened. In the early 1900s, Jacob Erdheim demonstrated that the four parathyroid glands were enlarged in osteomalacia and in rickets and thought it was a compensatory phenomenon. Subsequently, occasional cases of bone disease were encountered in which only a single gland was enlarged. In 1915, Friedrich Schlaugenhaufer suggested that enlargement of a single parathyroid gland might be the cause of the bone disease, not its result. The fi rst parathyroidectomy for von Recklinghausen’s disease of the bone was performed by Felix Mandl in 1925 in Vienna. Subsequently, the parathyroid glands were shown to be affected by a number of primary pathological processes – neoplasia (adenoma and carcinoma) and hyperplasia (wasserhelle cell and chief cell types) – that resulted in overactivity and required surgical removal of one or more of them [ 1 ].