The association of cigarette smoking with clinical subtypes of ophthalmic Graves' disease

Abstract

We retrospectively reviewed the smoking habits of 124 patients with Graves' ophthalmopathy. We divided these patients into those without restrictive myopathy (type I) and those with restrictive myopathy (type II). Sixty-three percent of type I and 83% of type II patients were smokers at the time of diagnosis. The incidence of smoking in an age- and gender-matched randomly selected control population in the same geographic area was 30% for controls matched to our type I group and 26.6% for controls matched to our type II group. We believe smoking is an important factor in the development of both clinical subtypes of Graves' ophthalmopathy.