Bio-psycho-social Correlates of Psychological Distress in Patients With Graves' Disease in Euthyroid Status

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.