To the editor,
I have read the article titled “Thyroid disease post-COVID-19 infection: Report of a case with new-onset autoimmune thyroid disease” by Trinh et al. [1] with great interest. While reading this interesting rare case, I was puzzled by a few points that I could not comprehend.
First; in the article, the discrepancy between the time and dates of the onset of hyperthyroidism post-COVID-19 in the abstract, introduction, and discussion is very striking. In a few places, it is said to be 4 weeks (the first paragraph of the introduction and conclusion), and 6 weeks in the first paragraph under the case report, but when the data are calculated from the dates, it is 5 weeks (February 14, 2022–March 21, 2022), but in the abstract it is 8 weeks later, which is even more confusing.
Second; in this case report, standard abbreviations were not used when describing the patient and writing laboratory data. The units (U/L) versus (mIU/L) and abbreviations (TGAb) of laboratory values appear different in the text and table, which is perplexing [1].
Also, COVID-19 is the name of the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection. Therefore, we believe that “post-COVID-19 infection or pre-COVID-19 infection” definitions and terms are not correct in the article text and the title [1].
Third; even in an article from 2021 literature [2], 5 cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection-induced Graves’ disease (autoimmune hyperthyroidism) were already mentioned by 3 independent groups 2 from Spain and one from the United States [2-5]. While it was surprising for us that the authors here mentioned 3 cases in this article published in March 2023 [1]. In this article, the references between 3 and 5 that we have cited here are probably unavailable or may have been overlooked. Our references between 3 and 5 belong to the years 2020 and 2021 are not given in the references of this article [1].
I would like to thank the authors for this nice case report raising awareness of SARS-CoV-2 infection-induced hyperthyroidism. This is a case report that later paved the way for future research on SARS-CoV-2 infection-induced autoimmune hyperthyroidism as well.
Acknowledgment
None.
Conflicts of interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
Author contribution
Öner Özdemir has done everything.
Footnotes
The author approved the submission.
References
- 1.Trinh AN, Nguyen KH, Nguyen DV. Thyroid disease post-COVID-19 infection: report of a case with new-onset autoimmune thyroid disease. Asia Pac Allergy 2023;13:54-56. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
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