Introduction:

Allergic rhinitis is a common chronic allergic disease. The effects of allergic diseases on autoimmune diseases are not known. The patients are predisposed to react to exogenic antigens in allergic diseases and they can more easily react to endogenous antigens. Therefore, autoantibody prevalence studies are required. In this study, we attempted to prove the possible relation between the thyroid function tests, thyroid autoantibodies and allergic rhinitis.

Methods:

A total of 319 patients, with 193 (60%) with allergic rhinitis between June 2015 and October 2015 and 126 (40%) as the control group were included in the study; 38% of the patient group was male and 62% was female; and 44% of the control group was male and 56% was female.

Results:

No significant difference was found in the antithyroglobuline (anti-Tg; p=0.295) and antithyroid peroxidase (anti-TPO; p=0.224) and thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH), free triiodothyronine (FT3), and free thyroxine (FT4) (p>0.05) values between the patient and control groups. In our study, autoantibody positivity ratios in the patients with allergic rhinitis were specified as 15.6% (anti-Tg) and 11.5% (anti-TPO). In addition, a weak positive relationship was found between the age and anti-Tg values (p<0.001; r=0.268).

Conclusion:

Allergic and autoimmune diseases together find are not common phenomena in an individual. This can be explained to usually managed by different processing of the Th1 and Th2 pathways. Although we did not find a statistical significance in our study, the thyroid autoantibodies were higher in the allergic rhinitis group with compared to controls . We believe that these patients should be closely monitored in terms of clinical and laboratory parameters and should be followed in terms of thyroid disease development.

Keywords: Allergic rhinitis, thyroid, autoantibody