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Thyroid Disease and Personality Study

Conditions
Graves' Disease
Interventions
Procedure: blood sampling
Registration Number
NCT02620085
Lead Sponsor
National Taiwan University Hospital
Brief Summary

Observe the relationship between thyroid function and personality traits

Detailed Description

Thyrotoxicosis was the biochemical and physiological manifestations of excess thyroid hormone. The clinical manifestation was palpitation, heat intolerance, hand tremor, and weight loss. The clinical manifestation also included nervous system, including anxiety, tension, irritability, hyperactivity, fatigue, and insomnia.

Where tensions features include restless, short attention span, and the impulse to want to move around. Some patients will progress to a non-specific psychiatric disorders. According to the study, about 10% of patients will occur very frank psychosis, 3, 31% to 69% of patients with depressive symptoms, 61% to 62% of patients with symptoms of anxiety.

Some studies using reliable evaluation tool to evaluate behavioral changes in patients with thyrotoxicosis, such as Clyde emotional scale, multi-faceted personality assessment table (Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)), or observation of a response time to visual or audio stimulation. After treatment of thyrotoxicosis, most of these indicators have improved, but some indicators were still abnormal after treatment of thyrotoxicosis, such as MMPI and voice response time.

The physiological causes of the changes of these nervous system is not clear. The symptoms was improved after the use of sympathetic inhibitors, so presumably this may correlated with autonomic nervous system disorders.

Thyroid hormone receptors are widely distributed in the brain may also be one of the cause. But there still some other reasons for the changes of neurological symptoms because neurological symptoms may not be back to normal even after thyroid function returned to normal. Autoimmune dysfunction affect brain function may be the most possible reason. Graves' disease is the most common cause of thyrotoxicosis and it is related to autoimmune thyroid antibodies.

Clinically, some patients of Graves' disease may combined with other autoimmune disease, such as Sicca syndrome. The patient may still have nervous personality traits despite normalized thyroid function. Some patients even need long-term use of anti-anxiety medication.

In this study, investigators hope to analyze the personality traits of patients with hyperthyroidism,especially patients of Graves' disease, in Taiwan and to observe the changes during treatment. Investigators also hope to observe the statistical change of other non-thyroid-specific autoimmune index in this thyrotoxicosis patient. After obtaining these results, investigators will evaluate whether to continue to study the hypothesis of affection of brain of thyrotoxic patients by the abnormal autoimmune system.

Recruitment & Eligibility

Status
UNKNOWN
Sex
All
Target Recruitment
500
Inclusion Criteria
  • aged between 20 and 85 years
  • euthyroid Graves' disease
Exclusion Criteria
  • Patients who were not capable to complete the questionnaire due to severe cognitive dysfunction or under education were excluded from this study

Study & Design

Study Type
OBSERVATIONAL
Study Design
Not specified
Arm && Interventions
GroupInterventionDescription
Graves' diseaseblood samplingPatient had been diagnosed of Graves' disease and now under euthyroid status
Primary Outcome Measures
NameTimeMethod
Psychological distress in scores measured using the Brief Symptom Rating ScaleWithin one year after inclusion

Psychological distress is measured by using the Brief Symptom Rating Scale (BSRS). The BSRS is a self-report questionnaire with 30 items rated from 0 to 4 scores on the basis of the degree of distress. BSRS covers nine dimensions of psychopathology: somatization, obsessive-compulsive disorder, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anxiety, hostility, phobic-anxiety, paranoid ideation, and additional symptoms.

Secondary Outcome Measures
NameTimeMethod

Trial Locations

Locations (1)

Shyang-Rong Shih

🇨🇳

Taipei, Taiwan

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