The Concept of Cure in Thyroid Diseases

Abstract

: “Cure” has been referred to maintaining a healthy situation before the occurrence of the illness. With emerging non-communicable chronic diseases, many treatment approaches and management of these disorders have been found to control the disease, despite the fact that the status of the human body does not return to like it was before the illness. Patients become asymptomatic, but their body composition, cellular, and humoral factors differ from healthy individuals. In this article, it has been discussed that after treatment of thyroid diseases, only in few conditions the status of thyroid returns to the healthy situation after discontinuation of therapy and majority of thyroid illnesses are managed as “controlled”, meaning that patients become asymptomatic. However, their thyroid structure, function, and biochemical factors fundamentally change. Therefore, patients may need additional permanent treatment to attain euthyroidism and especial follow-up for recurrence of the disease. For example, for Graves’ hyperthyroidism, all three forms of therapeutic approaches fail to re-establish continuous normal thyroid function in all patients. Long-term anti-thyroid drug therapy appears to cause an increase in the number of patients with Graves’ disease to attain a cure without further treatment.