Читать книгу The Healthy Thyroid: What you can do to prevent and alleviate thyroid imbalance - Patsy Westcott - Страница 69

Back in 1991, a team of Swedish researchers found that those developing Graves’ had often suffered an unhappy event in the recent past. The death of a close relative or friend was reported by 15 per cent of Graves’ patients compared with 10 per cent of a control group. The disease was also more likely to strike those who were divorced or less happy with their jobs – suggesting that long-term anxiety, unhappiness and other negative feelings could be a factor.

In 1998, Japanese researchers reported in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine that women diagnosed with Graves’ disease were seven-and-a-half times more likely to have experienced stressful life events although, curiously, the same finding did not hold true for men. In 2001, another study, reported in the journal Clinical Endocrinology, found a five-and-a-half-fold increase in ‘life events’ in individuals with Graves’ compared with those with toxic nodular goitre and those without thyroid problems. Intriguingly, in this study, people with Graves’ had also experienced more happy – but still potentially stressful – events like a promotion, a pay rise, getting engaged or married, or having a baby.

None of these studies prove conclusively that stress is to blame for triggering Graves’ disease, but they do suggest a significant connection. However, fewer connections have been found linking stress with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. Clearly, more research is needed to unravel the precise mechanism by which stress may tip the thyroid into overactivity and to determine whether it is a factor in thyroid underactivity.