The relationships between surgical histometry, outcome and pre-treatment in Graves' disease

Quantitative histometric methods were used to established the relationships between the extent of thyroid lymphocytic infiltration at operation, and outcome exactly 18 months later in 50 surgically-treated Graves' disease patients prepared by carbimazole and triiodothyronine. Periods of pre-operative treatment, surgical technique, histometric analysis and diagnostic criteria were all standardised. Controls (107) were obtained from the forensic laboratory. Thirty-seven patients became euthyroid, but there was no relationship between outcome and epithelial or lymphoid content of the thyroid gland. Neither was there any correlation between the size of lymphoid infiltrate and epithelial mass of the resected thyroids, suggesting that simple lymphocyte infiltrations do not replace thyroid tissue as once thought. The variation in thyroid epithelial content was nearly 3-fold, so that a surgeon, even if able accurately to judge the anatomical mass of the remnant, would still have little or no idea of its functional mass. The scatter of epithelial content was even greater in glands from patients prepared for surgery by propranolol alone (38 glands, variation X 5.5) or propranolol and iodide (32 glands, variation X 5.9). Outcome after sub-total thyroidectomy for Graves' disease seems unrelated to the lymphocyte content of the gland and it is questionable to what extent the surgeon can either predict or control the outcome of thyroidectomy in individual Graves' disease patients.