Thyroid Dysfunction in Female Patients With Acne Vulgaris: [ Relation to Other Variables ]

Overview

Acne is a chronic inflammatory disease of the pilo-sebaceous unit with a multi-factorial etiology. It is one of the most frequent cutaneous diseases, affecting more than eighty percent of the population at some point in their lives . Endocrine factors especially androgens and steroids are one of multiple factors provoked to be involved in pathogenesis of acne . Thyroid hormones have steroid like action that have many regulatory functions in many body organ functions including skin and pilosebaceous unit. Furthermore, subtle thyroid dysfunction was shown to have a role in many disease conditions. Thyroid hormone action on sebaceous glands is unclear. In hypothyroid states, sebocytes exhibit reduced rates of secretion that increases with thyroxine administration .

Most of studies about thyroid dysfunction in acne patients focused on adult acne population especially females and searched for presence or absence of associating anti-thyroid antibodies with controversial results . Some other studies were concerned with the impact of acne treatments as tetracycline, isotretinoin or radiotherapy on thyroid pathologies and dysfunction . Global Acne Severity Scale (GAGS) is a simple, accurate, fast method for the determination of severity of acne, and it requires no special equipment and is relatively cost-effective. Its personal and interpersonal differences is low and it was first used by Doshi and his colleagues in 1997 in USA . To the best of knowledge, little is published about thyroid dysfunction in acne female patients of different age categories and correlating thyroid function with other important patient and acne variables as body mass index (BMI) , age (starting from 16 years) , acne type, severity and duration.

Conditions