Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Acromegaly is a disease caused by excessive secretion of growth hormone and subsequently insulin growth factor 1. It is believed that this oversecretion can cause increased prevalence of nodular goiter and thyroid cancer. However, the amount of studies comparing acromegalic patients with control groups is low. The aim of the study was to assess the prevalence of thyroid lesions in patients with acromegaly in comparison with age and sex-matched control group.

Materials and methods: We have searched the medical documentation of patients with acromegaly treated in single endocrine department in the years 2003–2013. The prevalence of thyroid lesions was compared with the group of patients with hormonally inactive adrenal incidentalomas. Thyroid ultrasonography is routine procedure performing in every patient hospitalised in our department.

Results: patients with acromegaly and 184 patients with incidentalomas were included. mean age was 52.6 and 53.9 years respectively (P=0.44), percent of women – 60.5 vs 65.2% respectively (P=0.35). Any thyroid lesions were present in 77.6% of patients with acromegaly and 63.0% with incidentalomas (P=0.002), multinodular goiter in 66.8% vs 47.8% (P=0.0002), thyroid cancer in 5.4% vs 2.7% (P=0.21) respectively. RRs were 1.2 with 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.1–1.4, 1.3 (1.1–1.6) and 2.0 (95% CI 0.7–5.6) respectively. In case of subjects with at least one thyroid lesion, maximal diameter of the biggest thyroid lesion was significantly higher in patients with acromegaly than in control group – median 13.0 vs 9.0 mm (P=0.0008). Also the mean thyroid volume was significantly higher in acromegalic patients (35.5 vs 17.7 cm³, P<0.0001).

Conclusions: Structural thyroid abnormalities are significantly more common in patients with acromegaly. Our study, performed on one of the largest described groups of acromegalic patients, confirms that systematic thyroid examination should be important part of follow-up in case of patients with acromegaly.