Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Patients with benign thyroid disease may present an impaired Quality of Life (QoL). However, evidence of cosmetic complaints in patients with thyroid disease is limited. The aim of the current study was to investigate the cosmetic complaints of patients with thyroid disease and determine any associations with specific clinical characteristics.

Methods: A cross-sectional study was performed. Patients with benign thyroid disease who attended the Endocrinology Outpatient Clinic of Hippokration General Hospital during 2017–2018 were included. Thyroid-related quality of life was measured by the Greek translated and cross-cultural validated version of ThyPRO. ThyPRO includes nine subscales for nine different aspects of quality of life. Each score is constructed by the summation of relevant items and linear transformation to a range of 0–100, where 100 indicates most symptoms/impact on QoL.

Results: In total, 376 patients with thyroid disease were included in the analysis, of which 151 patients had a non-toxic nodular goiter, 13 had a toxic adenoma, 40 had Graves’ disease, 128 were diagnosed with Hashimoto thyroiditis and 44 patients had non-autoimmune hypothyroidism. Among all patients, those with Graves’ orbitopathy presented higher scores in the ThyPRO cosmetic complaints scale, followed by patients with Graves’ disease, without orbitopathy. Cosmetic complaints were higher in both hypothyroid and hyperthyroid patients vs. euthyroid patients (20 and 26 vs 13 respectively, P=0.012). Levothyroxine (Lt4) supplementation was correlated with a higher cosmetic complaint scale score in comparison to no medication.

Conclusion: Not only hyperthyroidism but also hypothyroidism seem to negatively affect the appearance-related aspect of QoL. Not surpisingly, patients with Graves orbitopathy have more cosmetic complaints in comparison to all other patients with benign thyroid disease.