A comparison of porcine and human thyroid tissue in the assay of thyroid stimulating immunoglobulins.

The central role of Thyroid Stimulating Immunoglobulins (TSI) in the pathogenesis of the hyperthyroidism of Graves' disease has become generally accepted and a wide variety of assays for the detection of these antibodies has been developed. The dependence on the availability of human thyroid tissue makes most of these assays unsuitable for routine clinical use, a problem circumvented by the use of nonhuman thyroid tissue in some TSI assays. We therefore compared porcine and human thyroid tissue in a TSI assay based on in vitro cAMP generation.