Trick or Thyroid

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.