Endocrine Abstracts

Primary prevention aims at keeping the disease from occurring at all by removing risk factors. Secondary prevention is directed at early detection of disease, when the disease is still asymptomatic and when early treatment can stop the disease from progressing. Tertiary prevention refers to those clinical activities that prevent further deterioration or reduce complications after disease has declared itself. When applying the concept of prevention to TED, there is a problem wi...

Graves’ ophthalmopathy (GO) in the majority of cases is modest and self-limiting and no treatment is required beside local measures and prompt control of thyroid dysfunction. A minority of patients (3–5%) have severe GO which warrants aggressive treatment to arrest further progression and eventually achieve regression of existing ocular signs and symptoms. Treatment of severe GO is a complex therapeutic challenge and available treatments provide unsatisfactory result...

Advances in understanding the pathogenesis of autoimmune diseases is leading to development of new targeted therapies, with the resultant improvements in the management of the patients. Autoimmunity to the TSH receptor is the main cause of Graves’ disease and components of this disorder are the extrathyroidal complications which include Graves’ ophthalmopathy and pretibial dermopathy. Recent studies in Graves’ ophthalmopathy implicate an additional target antige...

The ophthalmic management of thyroid eye disease has changed markedly over the last 2 decades: There has been a significant trend towards more surgical involvement in both the active disease phase (with orbital decompression for relief of optic neuropathy, or eyelid surgery for severe exposure keratitis) and in the quiescent phase – with rehabilitative decompression (rather than eyelid surgery) having become the procedure of choice for most patients with established propt...