[Is the thyroidectomy a surgical standard procedure for therapy of Graves' disease?]

Surgery is an important therapeutic option in the treatment of Graves' disease. Nevertheless it is still controversial discussed wether the extent of resection correlates with the rate of surgical complications and the therapeutic success. Therefore we performed a retrospective analysis on 75 surgically treated patients. 58 of these 75 patients were examined after a median interval of 34.2 months. The examination focussed on the appearance of temporary and permanent palsy of the recurrent laryngeal nerve, hypoparathyroidism, recurrences, and on the postoperative course of thyroid-stimulating-hormone-receptor antibody (TSH-ab) titers. Total thyroidectomy has been performed in 51 and bilateral resection with a remnant thyroid volume less than 2 ml each side in 24 patients. We could not confirm a significant difference concerning the postoperative complication rates between both groups. In the bilateral resection group we saw 3 cases of recurrent goitre and a more unfavourable course of TSH-ab titers than in the thyroidectomy group. For these reasons we propose the total thyroidectomy as surgical standard procedure for therapy of Graves' disease.