Bone Microarchitectural Changes in Hyperthyroid Women Compared to a Normal Canadian Cohort

Thyroid hormones play a critical role in bone physiology during childhood, but also impacts adult bone metabolism. Hyperthyroidism promotes accelerated bone turnover and bone remodelling which is associated with net loss of bone mineral density over time (BMD) and these changes have been quantitated using the gold standard of measuring BMD, Dual Energy X-ray Absorptiometry (DEXA). Ordinarily, biochemical thyroid hormone normalization restores BMD towards normal, yet an increased risk of fractures remains lifelong. DEXA, therefore, cannot explain the underlying etiology for fracture risk which may be due to undetected changes in bone microarchitecture. Our primary objective was to utilize an investigational 3-dimensional bone imaging technology, High Resolution peripheral Quantitative Tomography (HR-pQCT), to study bone microarchitecture in actively hyperthyroid women to determine if there are changes in cortical and trabecular bone microarchitecture from that of age-matched controls. A subset of women were rescanned using HR-pCT after thyroid hormones had been normalized for at least 6 months to determine if there were cortical/trabecular architectural changes that reversed towards normal in these individual cases. We enrolled 20 hyperthyroid women (age 20–76) for this pilot study who had persistent TSH suppression for >3 months (TSH< 0.5, normal range: 0.5–4.49 mU/L) without secondary causes for bone loss. Their etiology was divided amongst TSH suppression for thyroid carcinoma, Grave’s disease and iatrogenic hyperthyroidism. HR-pQCT scans of the radius were compared to age-matched scans of normal females, available from the robust Canadian Multicentre Osteoporosis Study (CaMOS) control cohort. Four participants were re-scanned after 6 months of TSH normalization to assess reversibility. The observed data showed statistically significant differences in key parameters of bone microarchitecture in hyperthyroidism, independent of etiology. We observed decreased cortical thickness and increased failure load as statistically different from age-matched controls. Increases in cortical bone porosity and decreases in volumetric bone density (cortical, trabecular and total) were notable but did not reach significance in this small study. Repeat scans following normalization of thyroid hormone levels revealed consistent (partial, nonsignificant) normalization of multiple bone microarchitecture elements including increased trabecular number/thickness, and decreased cortical porosity. These findings suggest that there are changes in both cortical and trabecular bone during active hyperthyroidism that may contribute to increased lifelong fracture risk.