Resistance to Thyroid Hormone

Leslie J. DeGroot

doi:10.7326/0003-4819-125-7-199610010-00022

Letters |1 October 1996

Resistance to Thyroid Hormone

Leslie J. DeGroot, MD

Article, Author, and Disclosure Information

TO THE EDITOR:

Historians have recognized that history is a collection of impressions that can be presented in many ways. Voltaire said that “in all nations, history is disfigured by fable” and “history proves that anything can be proved by history.” However, the sequence of recognition of thyroid hormone receptor mutations as a cause of resistance to thyroid hormone is not as suggested in the editorial by Dr. Sawin [1].

The first patients with resistance to thyroid hormone were observed in 1964 by Dr. Loren T. DeWind and were initially studied at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. Characterization of their syndrome as being caused by resistance to thyroid hormone came from studies that were done at Massachusetts General Hospital and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1965-1966 (published in 1967 [2]) and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1966 and the University of Chicago in 1969 (published in 1972). Dr. Samuel Refetoff and I subsequently worked on this problem until the cause became elucidated two decades later. It was impossible at first to get closer to the cause because the concept of receptors was just developing (thyroid hormone receptors were first recognized by Oppenheimer and colleagues in 1972). We studied the receptors in the original patients by using fibroblasts and showed in 1978 that the receptors of these patients were abnormal [3].

FULL TEXT

PDF

Not Available

Letters |1 October 1996

Resistance to Thyroid Hormone

Content

Information For

Services

Awards and Cover

Other Resources

Follow Annals On

Letters |1 October 1996

Resistance to Thyroid Hormone

Content

Information For

Services

Awards and Cover

Other Resources

Follow Annals On

You need a subscription to this content to use this feature.