I don’t know if you’ve ever read the blog Dear Thyroid, but if you haven’t, you’re in for a treat. Example: “I happen to love Halloween. Because I have Graves’ Ophthalmopathy and I’m a sphere on mini-stilts (5’4), I am a walking costume. I can go to parties, if I choose to, as a pissed off Graves’ disease patient.” Hilarious. Anyway, it got us thinking about Graves — a condition related to an overactive thyroid that causes the eyes to bulge from the sockets, used for comedic advantage by the likes of Marty Feldman and Rodney Dangerfield. A UCLA study recently looked into why the condition attacks the eye sockets. Turns out the problem isn’t all the thyroid‘s fault, but trouble also lies with defective infection fighting T-cells (which mature in our good friend the thymus), which attack the eye tissue.

Tags: antibodies, antibody receptors, autoimmune disorders, endocrinology, environmental factors, GD, GO, hyperthyroidism, hypothyroidism, IGF-1, immune system, insulin-like growth factor 1, overactive thyroid, toxins

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 10:33 am and is filed under anatomy, Body Parts, I Heart Guts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.