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Page: Signs and Symptoms
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Major clinical weight loss (often accompanied by a ravenous appetite), intolerance to heat, fatigue, weakness, hyperactivity, irritability, apathy, depression, polyuria, and sweating. Additionally, patients may present with a variety of symptoms such as palpitations and arrhythmias (notably atrial fibrillation), shortness of breath (dyspnea), loss of libido, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. In the elderly, these classical symptoms may not be present and they may present only with fatigue and weight loss leading to apathetic hyperthyroidism.
Neurological manifestations are tremor, chorea, myopathy, and periodic paralysis. Stroke of cardioembolic origin due to coexisting atrial fibrillation may be mentioned as one of the most serious complications of hyperthyroidism.
As to other autoimmune disorders related with thyrotoxicosis, an association between thyroid disease and myasthenia gravis has been well recognized. The thyroid disease, in this condition, is often an autoimmune one and approximately 5% of patients with myasthenia gravis also have hyperthyroidism. Myasthenia gravis rarely improves after thyroid treatment and relation between two entities is yet unknown. Some very rare neurological manifestations that are reported to be dubiously associated with thyrotoxicosis are pseudotumor cerebri, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and a Guillain-Barre'-like syndrome.
Minor ocular signs, which may be present in any type of hyperthyroidism, are eyelid retraction ("stare") and lid-lag. These "fear-like" eye-signs result from thyroid hormone's exacerbation of the action of norepinephrine. In hyperthyroid stare (Dalrymple sign) the eyelids are retracted upward more than normal (the normal position is at the superior corneoscleral limbus, where the "white" of the eye begins at the upper border of the iris). In lid-lag (von Graefe's sign), when the patient tracks an object downward with their eyes, the eyelid fails to follow the downward moving iris, and the same type of upper globe exposure which is seen with lid retraction occurs, temporarily. These signs disappear with treatment of the hyperthyroidism, or treatment by certain anti-adrenergic drugs.
Neither of these ocular signs should be confused with exopthalmos (protrusion of the eyeball) which occurs in one thyroid-related disease (Graves' disease), but which is not caused by the hyperthyroid state in that disease, and is unrelated to it. Exopthalmos when present may exacerbate these signs, however.
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