Endocrine Abstracts

Objective: To evaluate the prognostic value of interleukin-8 studies in the development of thyrotoxic cardiomyopathy in patients with Graves’ disease.

Materials and methods: 86 patients with newly diagnosed Graves’ disease were examined, aged 18 to 55 years (mean age 37 years [28; 45]) without previous cardiovascular events. All patients were analyzed by interleukin-8 by immuno-enzyme analysis. To determine the threshold value for Interleukin-8, the logistic recession method (ROC analysis) is used.

Results: Of the 86 patients initially, 33 showed signs of cardiomyopathy, and the level of interleukin-8 was higher than in patients without signs of cardiomyopathy (18.6 [15.7; 19.6] vs. 13.2 [11, 4; 14, 6] (P=0.0001)). The area under the ROC curve (AUC), the diagnostic ability of the logistic regression model, predicts the development of thyrotoxic cardiomyopathy using the definition of IL-8 is 0.888, which corresponds to the very good predictive ability of this diagnostic parameter. According to the obtained result, the threshold value for the diagnosis of thyrotoxic cardiomyopathy in patients with Graves’ disease in terms of IL-8 level can be taken as equal to more than 14.7 pg/ml, while the sensitivity is 84.8%, and the specificity is 87.1%.

Conclusions: Determination of the concentration of IL-8 in patients with Graves’ disease may serve as an additional marker in the diagnosis of thyrotoxic cardiomyopathy, especially in unclear cases.