Hashimoto's Thyroiditis

Though a diagnosis rarely made a decade ago, Hashimoto's disease is now recognized with considerable frequency. This change is due to the wider use of the needle biopsy and, more importantly, to the demonstration of autoimmunization in this disease by Witebsky, Rose and Shulman1 and by Roitt et al.2 The circulating autoantibodies were initially thought to be the cause of the inflammatory process, but this now seems unlikely. The thyroid lesions are not necessarily correlated with the level of circulating antibodies, and passive transfer by means of serum has failed. It now seems that the initial event in the experimental . . .