Читать книгу The Healthy Thyroid: What you can do to prevent and alleviate thyroid imbalance - Patsy Westcott - Страница 62

For six to eight out of 10 women, hyperthyroidism is a result of Graves’ disease, another autoimmune condition that is the mirror image of Hashimoto’s disease. It is most common between the ages of 20 and 40, but it can be seen in girls as young as five and, very occasionally, in the infants of sufferers.

Robert James Graves, a charismatic Irish physician, gave his name to the illness. In 1835, he wrote a paper outlining all the symptoms now recognized as Graves’ disease in the UK and USA. In Europe, the same condition is often called ‘von Basedow’s disease’, after Dr Carl A. von Basedow, a private practitioner in Germany, who described the illness in 1840. Graves was the first to make the connection with pregnancy – the women he wrote about were all pregnant (see Chapter 9).