1. ¹Department of Medicine, Queen Mary Hospital, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
2. ²Department of Pathology, Queen Mary Hospital, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Correspondence: Dr WY Au, University Department of Medicine, 4/F Professorial Block, Queen Mary Hospital, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong. E-mail: auwing@hotmail.com

Received 28 June 2004; Accepted 5 October 2004; Published online 10 January 2005.

Abstract

Autoimmune thyroid disease (AITD) may occur in patients after hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT). In all, 10 cases of AITD (seven allogeneic and three autologous HSCT) were diagnosed among 721 HSCT recipients, including two patients with sequential hyper- and hypothyroidism. The 5-year actuarial rates for AITD after allogeneic and autologous HSCT were 2.9 and 4%, respectively. Significant risk factors included HSCT for chronic myeloid leukemia, the HLA B46 and DR9 loci and the A2B46DR9 haplotype, while female donors showed trend to significance. On multivariate analysis, only female donors and HLA DR9 remained significant. For autologous HSCT, the associations with HLA B46 and DR9 were also significant. Only three donors had a family history of AITD. A review of other reported cases confirmed the predominance of female donors, although the other associations including graft-versus-host disease, familial AITD and other autoimmune phenomena might be related to reporting bias. Since the actuarial incidence of AITD from female donors with predisposing HLA alleles may be over 30%, susceptible recipients should be carefully monitored. Owing to the small number of reported cases and different HLA associations with AITD in different populations, our observations await confirmatory data from other registries.