SAN ANTONIO – Breast cancer patients have an increased prevalence of autoimmune thyroid disease, according to a comprehensive meta-analysis incorporating 26 published studies.
That being said, the cause of this strong association remains to be determined by future longitudinal studies. In the interim, the take-home message from this meta-analysis is that it’s useful to screen women with breast cancer for autoimmune thyroid disease, Dr. Prue Hardefeldt observed at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.
The pooled analysis demonstrated that breast cancer patients were 2.92-fold more likely to have autoimmune thyroiditis than controls without breast disease. In addition, they were 2.02-fold more likely to be positive for antithyroid antibodies, and they had a 2.26-fold greater prevalence of goiter, according to Dr. Hardefeldt of the Whitely-Martin Research Center at the University of Sydney.
Breast cancer patients were also 50%-80% more likely than other women to be either hyper- or hypothyroid; however, these trends didn’t achieve statistical significance.
She declared having no financial conflicts.