Diagnosis and treatment of hypothyroidism in old people : A new old challenge.

Wien Klin Wochenschr

Department of General Surgery and Medical-Surgical Specialties, University of Catania, Via S. Sofia,78, 95123, Catania, Italy.

Published: March 2020

AI Article Synopsis

  • The text talks about diagnosing and treating hypothyroidism in older people, which can be tricky for doctors.
  • It mentions that older adults are more likely to have hypothyroidism than younger people, and their bodies change as they age, making it harder to spot the condition.
  • Finally, it stresses that when treating older patients, doctors need to be careful about giving too much medicine and risk making them worse, but untreated hypothyroidism can lead to serious problems like myxedema coma.

Article Abstract

Purpose: To review the diagnosis and the treatment of both subclinical and overt hypothyroidism in old people, which could represent a challenge for the clinicians.

Methods: Narrative literature review. An extensive literature search was performed using the databases of Scopus, Medline through PubMed, and Google Scholar from January 1975 to May 2019. The search terms were "hypothyroidism," "older adults," "elderly," and "myxedema."

Results: Hypothyroidism is more common among older subjects in comparison to the younger counterparts. The hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid axis and its hormones undergo significant changes due to the physiological aging process. For a correct diagnosis of hypothyroidism in old people clinicians must take such age-related changes into account.

Conclusions: The administration of replacement therapy in older adults should consider frailty, polypharmacy and a high risk to develop overtreatment symptoms. On the other hand, older patients with untreated or undertreated hypothyroidism may develop a state of myxedema coma.

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Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00508-019-01579-8DOI Listing

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