Monday, November 21, 2005

Don’t forget the thyroid in chronic urticaria

There is a high prevalence of thyroid autoimmunity in patients with chronic urticaria. The patient with urticaria and anti-thyroid antibodies may be euthyroid, hyperthyroid or hypothyroid. The mechanism of the association is poorly understood. The Thyroid and Urticaria is a review of the topic in the October issue of Current Opinion in Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

Some patients may achieve remission with L-thyroxine, which of course is indicated for those who are hypothyroid. Such treatment of euthyroid patients is not supported by high level evidence and is controversial.

Thyroid testing should be considered in patients with chronic urticaria. Knowledge of this association could help a patient and might come in handy some day on internal medicine boards.

4 comments:

Allen said...

Unrelated to the current post, but I've not been able (or am too stupid to) find an email addy for you.

Your blog is very nice, but your RSS feed has nearly unreadably small font size. I don't know why, but yours is the only one with remarkably small print in RSS.

I hope you'll consider fixing it. Respectfully,

Allen
www.gruntdoc.com

Robert W Donnell said...

Allen,
Thanks for the feedback. I'm going to be working on several design and technical issues soon.

Unknown said...

i could very easily associate myself with your article ...As i been chronic urticaria patient recently found that i am hypothyroid.. although have been getting my tsh levels checked since that time but nothing showed until recently.. please advice me that if my Dr has prescribed eltroxin will this help me in treating urticaria also??? or i should opt for levethyroxine only as mentioned in your article

Sarah Nickolet said...

I have chronic urticaria. My TSH was tested and came back "normal". My thyroid antibodies came back off the charts. My endocrinologist put me on 100 ug of Synthroid. While my TSH is now very low, my free T4 remains normal. Therefore this shows I have some degree of thyroid dysfunction since if I truly didn't my free T4 would be abnormal while medicated on Synthroid.