70 years, China's first endocrinology department, and the world's largest aldosteronism series
To walk into the Department of Endocrine and Metabolic Diseases of Ruijin Hospital in central Shanghai is to walk into the place where Chinese endocrinology began. The department was founded in the early 1950s by Professor Kuang Ankun, the French-trained physician who established endocrinology as a clinical discipline in China, together with the founding generation of Chinese endocrinologists — Professors Xu Manyin, Chen Jialun, and Luo Bangyao. In 1957 the department diagnosed China's first case of primary aldosteronism, the adrenal disorder that had been described in the international literature only months earlier — a diagnostic feat that announced the arrival of Chinese endocrine medicine. In the 2024 Fudan Hospital Specialty Reputation Rankings, the department was again named China's leading endocrinology unit, a position it has held for more than a decade.
The department's role in the country is not just clinical. It is the founding unit of the Chinese Ministry of Health Key Laboratory of Endocrine and Metabolic Diseases, the Shanghai Institute of Endocrine and Metabolic Diseases, and the Shanghai Clinical Medical Center for Endocrine and Metabolic Diseases, and it hosts the National Clinical Research Center for Metabolic Diseases, the country's national platform for metabolic-disease research, directed by Academician Ning Guang, president of Ruijin Hospital and a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. That set of designations gives the department a role in Chinese endocrinology similar to the one the National Cancer Center plays in oncology: it treats the most difficult cases, defines the national research agenda, and trains the specialty's workforce.
What the place actually looks like
Where most endocrinology departments in the world are organised around diabetes alone — the disease that dominates the specialty's patient volume everywhere — the Ruijin department is organised around the full endocrine system. Its clinical areas span diabetes and metabolic disease (anchored by a diabetes centre founded in 1994, one of China's earliest structured patient-education programmes, and pioneering work on non-invasive diabetic nerve-function testing), the pituitary-adrenal axis, thyroid disease, pancreatic disease, diabetes insipidus, obesity (one of China's first systematic obesity-research programmes), and osteoporosis (among the country's earliest systematic bone-metabolism studies). The pituitary-adrenal service is internationally notable by any standard: since the 1957 first case, the department has assembled a primary aldosteronism series of nearly 1,000 cases — among the largest single-centre series in the world — plus more than 600 Cushing syndrome cases and more than 300 phaeochromocytoma cases.
That structural choice — a single department that covers every endocrine gland and every metabolic system, with seventy years of continuous case archives attached — is the operational reason the department has kept the Fudan No.1 ranking for more than a decade. A patient who walks in with a hormone problem of unclear origin can be worked up across the full endocrine axis by a team that has been accumulating the country's longest diagnostic record in the field.
Why it became No.1
Three factors explain the department's grip on the Fudan ranking. First, the origin position: this is the department where Chinese endocrinology was founded, where its first textbooks were written, and where the founding generation — Kuang Ankun, Xu Manyin, Chen Jialun — trained nearly every subsequent leader of the Chinese specialty. Second, an unmatched case depth in the rare endocrine diseases that define a top department: the world-scale aldosteronism, Cushing, and phaeochromocytoma series, built continuously since the 1950s, and the research programme on primary aldosteronism that has won the National Science and Technology Progress Award. Third, the national research platform: the Ministry of Health key laboratory, the National Clinical Research Center for Metabolic Diseases under Academician Ning Guang, and the large national cardiometabolic cohort studies that have redefined the scale of diabetes in China — more than 400 published research projects, national guidelines for endocrine disease, and a postgraduate training programme that has produced several generations of Chinese endocrinologists.
That history matters for international patients because endocrinology is a specialty where diagnostic rarity — not surgical volume — separates the great departments from the good ones: adrenal and pituitary disease can go undiagnosed for years in centres that see few cases, and the Ruijin department's seventy-year diagnostic archive exists nowhere else in the country.
What this means for international patients
For a foreign patient considering endocrine treatment in China, the Ruijin department is the place that handles the cases the rest of the country refers out. The department's internationally recognised strengths are diabetes and cardiometabolic disease (where it runs the national research centre), adrenal and pituitary disease (where its case series are world-scale), thyroid disease, obesity, and osteoporosis. The department sits within Ruijin Hospital — itself ranked among China's top hospitals and the leading hospital of eastern China — at 197 Ruijin Er Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai, with international patient services available through the hospital's international division.
This profile is editorial information based on the sources linked below, not medical advice; individual outcomes depend on the endocrine disorder, its duration, the team, and the patient.