1Clinic of Endocrinology, ‘Victor Babes’ University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Timisoara, Romania; 2Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, ‘Victor Babes’ University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Timisoara, Romania.
Introduction: Elastography is a new dynamic technique that uses ultrasonography for the assessment of tissue stiffness. The principle of ultrasound-elastography is that compression of the examined tissue induces a smaller strain in hard tissues than in soft ones. Until now elastography has been applied to study the hardness and elasticity of thyroid nodules, aiming to differentiate malignant from benign ones.
Aim: We decided to study if ultrasound elastography by Acoustic Radiation Force Impulse (ARFI) can offer information about the stiffness of thyroid gland parenchyma in patients with chronic thyroid pathology, Graves’ disease and chronic autoimmune thyroiditis (CAT).
Patients and methods: We studied 51 patients, 29 with Graves’ disease and 22 with CAT (diagnosed by specific tests), and 23 healthy volunteers. For all subjects, 10 elastography determinations were performed in the right thyroid lobe (RTL) and 10 in the left thyroid lobe (LTL). The measurements were performed with a Siemens Acuson S2000 ultrasound system, using a convex probe 2–6 MHZ. The values were expressed in meters/second (m/s) and the median was calculated. We calculated a mean value between ARFI from LTL and RTL. The t-test was used to compare the ARFI values.
Results: We found a statistically significant difference between subjects without thyroid pathology (healthy volunteers) and those with autoimmune thyroid diseases (2.07±0.44 vs 2.68±0.50 m/s) (P<0.001). Thyroid stiffness was statistically significant higher in patients with Graves’ disease versus those with CAT (2.82±0.47 vs 2.49±0.48 m/s) (P=0.02). In cases with CAT, we obtained a significant difference between ARFI values in the two thyroid lobes.
Explanations for this difference would be the distribution of fibrosis in the thyroid gland and the differences regarding vascularization and thyroid volume.
Conclusion: ARFI seems to be a useful method to predict accurately enough the presence of autoimmune thyroid diseases (AUROC=0.80).
Article tools
My recent searches
My recently viewed abstracts
Authors
Endocrine Abstracts
ISSN 1470-3947 (print) | ISSN 1479-6848 (online)
© Bioscientifica 2024 |
Privacy policy |
Cookie settings
BiosciAbstracts
Bioscientifica Abstracts is the gateway to a series of products that provide a permanent, citable record of abstracts for biomedical and life science conferences.
Find out more