Figure 1.

Adrenal failure diagnosis according to different criteria. The number of patients and the frequency of adrenal failure (AF) according to several baseline cortisol cutoff values (≤10, ≤15, ≤20, ≤25, and ≤34 μg/dl), the classical ambulatory criteria considering serum cortisol ≤ 20 μg/dl after stimulus with corticotropin at low dose (cortisol 60) and at high dose (cortisol 120), and the presence of Δmax¹ ≤ 9 μg/dl and Δmax²⁴⁹ ≤ 9 μg/dl. It is observed that the higher the baseline cortisol level, the higher the theoretical diagnosis of AF. The low-dose test classified more patients with AF than the high-dose test when we considered the classical criteria of total cortisol ≤ 20 μg/dl after stimulus. This same pattern was observed for Δmax after low (Δmax¹ ≤ 9 μg/dl) and high (Δmax²⁴⁹ ≤ 9 μg/dl) corticotropin doses.