This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Hunter Heath III, MD
Mayo Clinic Rochester, Minn

JAMA. 1988;260(15):2219.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

I write to comment on the article by Paul et al¹ reporting decreased femoral bone mineral density in women taking thyroxine in replacement or suppressive doses.

The study by Paul et al is interesting and provocative, but is neither definitive nor consonant with other findings. For example, for thyroxine to cause decreased cortical bone density in the femur but no change in the more labile, preponderantly trabecular spinal bone mineral density seems unlikely. One must be uneasy about the inclusion of patients who had earlier suffered from Graves' disease, because of its known effect on bone density. With respect to those patients who had Hashimoto's thyroiditis, some of them might have had accompanying thyrotoxicosis. There are other elements in the data suggesting that this could have been a case-selection phenomenon rather than a specific effect of thyroxine; for example, Paul et al found no differences between . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?