Abstract
Purpose :
Standardized nomenclature facilitates collaboration across specialties and institutions, as well as communication with patients. This study sought to analyze whether there is a predominant nomenclature for thyroid eye disease (TED), to identify possible associations of different terms with author and journal characteristics and trends over time from 2010 to 2020.
Methods :
A search in the PubMed database was completed for all articles published in 2010 and 2020 that contained TED related keywords identified by our interdisciplinary research team. Nomenclature, author and journal characteristics were extracted and descriptive as well as comparative statistical analysis was performed to identify associations.
Results :
The search yielded 324 and 147 publication results for 2020 and 2010 respectively. 303 of the 2020 publications and 141 of the 2010 publications were included for final analysis. Comparing 2020 to 2010 data, use of the term “Thyroid Eye Disease” (TED) saw the biggest increase from 21.3% to 36.6% (+15.3%) with the U.S. being the leading authorship country. Use of “Graves’ Orbitopathy” saw a moderate increase from 26.2% to 34.0% (+7.8%) Use of “Graves’ Ophthalmopathy” dropped from 27.4% to 19.2% (-8.2%). In 2020, ophthalmology journals saw the highest number of publications of 138 with more than 55.8% utilizing TED as the nomenclature. In contrast, in endocrinology journals as the second leading publishing group (78 articles), only 11.5% of the published articles used the term TED (p<0.01). Although the change was not statistically significant (p=0.23), both ophthalmology and endocrinology journals have seen upward trends in TED in the past decade from 33.8% to 55.8% (+22%) and 3% to 11% (+8%) respectively.
Conclusions :
“Thyroid Eye Disease” was the most commonly used term in 2020 not only by ophthalmologists, but also among almost all medical specialties. It also has the highest increase in the ophthalmology literature over the analyzed 10-year period. Based on our review, we propose that Thyroid Eye Disease (TED) would be the most appropriate term to standardize communication between patients and medical professionals, as well as documentation in the medical record. Our research was conducted by a multidisciplinary team and provides a guideline for authors of future scientific publications that is not rooted in personal preference, but in existing consensus.
This abstract was presented at the 2022 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Denver, CO, May 1-4, 2022, and virtually.