Quality of life in patients suffering from thyroid orbitopathy

The goal of medical care for most patients today is to obtain a more effective life and to preserve functioning and well-being. Scoring standardized responses to standardized questions is an efficient way to measure health status and individual health-related quality of life. Compared to a general population, patients with thyroid orbitopathy (TO) show a poor quality of life both in physical as well as in psychosocial dimensions. A large section of TO patients is not only physically ill, they also exhibit psychic illness. Consequently, among the majority of the TO patients, psychic and social factors in addition to physical ones play a role in their experience of their illness and essentially characterize their quality of life. According to these results, accompanying psychosomatic treatment would be indicated among roughly half of all TO patients.