Certain HLA alleles are associated with stress-triggered Graves' disease and influence its course.

There are no studies on HLA analysis in patients in whom Graves' disease (GD) hyperthyroidism has been preceded by ≥1 stressful event. The aim of the present study was to identify predisposing or protecting HLA alleles and their effects on the course of GD in this subset of patients. We performed serological HLA typing in 58 Caucasian patients with stress-related GD and in 130 matched healthy controls (HC).

Stress triggers the onset and the recurrences of hyperthyroidism in patients with Graves' disease.

The aim of this study was to evaluate the relationship of stressful events (SE) with the onset and outcome of Graves' disease (GD). Over a period of 21 years, we enrolled 58 consecutive patients in whom at least one SE had occurred ≤12 months before the onset of GD. Patients were treated with antithyroid drugs (ATD) for ≥12 months and followed up for ≥5 years after ATD withdrawal.

A patient with stress-related onset and exacerbations of Graves disease.

Background: An 18-year-old, nonsmoking woman presented to her general practitioner with a 1-week history of weakness, fatigue, palpitations, nervousness, tremors, insomnia, heat intolerance, and sudden enlargement of a thyroid goiter that had been detected 2 years earlier. The patient's symptoms had started shortly after she experienced emotional stress. Diagnostic work-up disclosed an avid radioactive iodine uptake by the goiter.

Altered intestinal absorption of L-thyroxine caused by coffee.

Objective: To report eight case histories, and in vivo and in vitro studies showing coffee's potential to impair thyroxine (T4) intestinal absorption.

Design: Of eight women with inappropriately high or nonsuppressed thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) when T4 was swallowed with coffee/espresso, six consented to the evaluation of their T4 intestinal absorption. This in vivo test was also administered to nine volunteers.

Germline mutation of von Hippel-Lindau (VHL) gene 695 G>A (R161Q) in a patient with a peculiar phenotype with type 2C VHL syndrome.

Von Hippel-Lindau (VHL) disease is an autosomal dominant familial neoplastic disorder with an estimated birth incidence of approximately 1:36000 live. VHL has intrafamilial variability expression and it is characterized by the predisposition to develop hemangioblastomas of the central nervous system and retina, pheochromocytomas, clear-cell renal carcinoma, adenomas, and carcinomas of the pancreas, paragangliomas, renal and pancreatic cysts, papillary cystadenomas of the epididymis and, rarely, cystadenomas of the endolymphatic sac tumor and broad ligament. We describe a Sicilian girl with type 2C VHL who showed the apparently de novo mutation R161Q in association with an extra-axial supratentorial frontal meningioma, which can be included as a characteristic sign in VHL.