Читать книгу The Healthy Thyroid: What you can do to prevent and alleviate thyroid imbalance - Patsy Westcott - Страница 68

Over the past few years, there has been increasing evidence that, in a number of illnesses, the immune system is weakened by negative mental states such as fear, tension, overwork, anxiety and exhaustion – in a word, stress. So, could stress be responsible for autoimmune thyroid problems? The answer seems to be yes, especially in the case of Graves’ disease.

Doctors in the 19th century observed that Graves’ disease often followed a period of severe emotional stress – a frightening episode or ‘actual or threatened separation from an individual upon whom the patient is emotionally dependent’. One 19th-century doctor, Bath-based physician Caleb Hillier Parry, described the onset of symptoms in the patient ‘Elisabeth S, aged 21’:

[She] was thrown out of a wheelchair in coming fast down hill, 28th April last, and very much frightened, though not much hurt. From this time she has been subject to palpitation of the heart, and various nervous affections. About a fortnight after this period she began to observe a swelling of the thyroid gland.

Today, Dr Mark Vanderpump, secretary of the doctors’ organization the British Thyroid Association, observes:

When compared with people without thyroid disease or patients with toxic nodular goitres, patients with Grave’s more often give a history of psychological stress before the onset of hyperthyroidism through immune suppression followed by immunological hyperactivity. The same phenomenon is seen post pregnancy as well when the immune system is suppressed during pregnancy and relapse follows delivery.

In Norway and Denmark, the incidence of hyperthyroidism increased during the first years of the Second World War. In their book Thyroid Disease: The Facts, Drs R.I.S. Bayliss and W.M.G. Tunbridge mention research showing a significant rise in the incidence of Graves’ disease in Northern Ireland since the start of political troubles in 1968. More recently, researchers reported a dramatic fivefold increase of Graves’ disease in eastern Serbia during the war in the former Yugoslavia.