Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Crohn’s disease is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease, most commonly affecting the terminal ileum and colon. In the other hand, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis is a chronic autoimmune inflammation of the thyroid gland. The association between the 2 diseases is rare. We report the observation of a patient with this association.

Observation: A 23-year-old female patient who consulted for persistent diarrhea, rectorrhagia, abdominal pain, bradycardia and asthenia. A workup was ordered in favor of hashimoto’s autoimmune hypothyroidism with TSH at 12 (normal value: 0.4-3.78 IU/ml), free T4 at 0.4 (normal value: 0.7-1.48 ng/dl), anti-thyroperoxidase antibody at 200 IU/ml (normal value: <0.1 IU/ml). The cervical ultrasound was in favor of thyroiditis. The patient was put on Lthyroxine supplementation; concomitantly, the patient benefited from a colonoscopy and biopsy which anatomopathological examination was in favor of the diagnosis of Crohn’s disease.

Discussion and conclusion: The coexistence of Crohn’s disease and Hashimoto’s thyroiditis is rare. This relationship has been explained by the coexistence of genetic and immunological factors. Several studies have shown that the immune response is polyclonal in both diseases. At present, there is no clear explanation for the coexistence of autoimmune thyroid disease and Crohn’s disease, a random coexistence remains possible but the increasing accumulation of reported cases requires further analysis to clarify the etiology of these associations.