Endocrine Abstracts

Background: Graves’ ophthalmopathy (GO) is an autoimmune disease that affects particularly the retrobulbar soft tissues and represents the most common extrathyroidal manifestation of Graves’ disease (GD). Some studies suggest that GO in newly diagnosed patients in recent years has a trend towards a less severe clinical presentation, moreover we have no studies that focus the trend of clinical presentation of GO in the last decade on the population of our area.

Aim: Of our study was to evaluate the temporal trend of the clinical presentation of GO in the east part of Sicily over the last decade.

Methods: We selected 221 consecutive patients observed from January 2005 to December 2006 and from January 20015 to December 2016. 21 patients were excluded because underwent to surgical orbital decompression, 40 patients because were previously treated by oral or parenteral corticosteroids and/or radiotherapy and 49 patients because longer GO duration. Finally we studied 111 patients with Graves’ Disease, diagnosed with GO according to EUGOGO criteria within 12 months from the Graves’ Disease diagnosis. We compared 55 consecutive patients, 11 males (F) and 44 females (M) come to our observation from January 2005 to December 2006 [group 1 (G1)], with 56 patients, 15 males, and 41 females, referred to us from 2015 to 2016 [group 2 (G2)].

Results: We assumed that iodine and selenium intake were similar between the groups; sex, age, smoke, thyroid function, LDL cholesterol, diabetes, impaired fasting glycaemia (IFG), impaired glucose tolerance (IGT), time from GD diagnosed to start of therapy (TGDD) and GO different grade of severity were tested by univariate analysis evidencing only TGDD reduced in G2 vs G1, P = 0.057. We build a bivariate logistic regression model considering the effect of age, TGDD, Hertel measurements, CAS, eyes motility improvement and GO severity (considering moderate to severe and severe GO as a same group) at presentation respect the two different temporal range considered in the study. Go severity was significantly reduced in G2 vs G1: Odds Ratio = 0.3; 95% CI 0.07-0.81, P = 0.02.

Conclusions: GO severity at presentation was significantly reduced in G2 as compared to G1. We were not able to found some factors related to GO severity decrement although TGDD was reduced by univariate analysis.