Study Status: Not yet recruiting
Recruit Status: Not yet recruiting
Study Type: Interventional
Official Title: A Randomized, Open-label, Parallel-group Study to Explore the Efficacy of High-intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) Versus Fixed-dose Radioiodine-131 in the Treatment of Relapsed Graves' Disease
Brief Summary:
Graves' disease (GD) is an autoimmune thyroid disorder caused by stimulating auto-antibodies to the thyrotrophin (TSH) receptor on thyroid follicular cells. It is the most common cause of hyperthyroidism and approximately 3% of women and 0.5% of men develop GD in their lifetime.
RAI has been shown to be a cost-effective and safe therapy in patients with GD but with some disadvantages. In addition, despite its proven efficacy and safety, many patients do not wish to undergo RAI because of radiation fear and prefer to either continue ATDs or have surgery.
High-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) is a non-invasive procedure that involves the application of a high-energy focused beam for thermal tissue ablation within a targeted zone. Similar to the principle of RAI (i.e. using ionizing radiation to ablate thyroid parenchyma and cause GD remission), we postulated that the heat energy generated from HIFU could also be used to ablate the thyroid parenchyma and cause GD remission. The idea of using heat energy to ablate thyroid parenchyma minimally invasively was recently reported using radiofrequency ablation but to our knowledge, we are one of the first (if not the first) group to propose using HIFU energy to ablate thyroid parenchyma as a definitive treatment for relapsed GD.
Having obtained ethical approval, a pilot study was conducted to examine the efficacy and safety of HIFU as a treatment for relapsed GD. In the pilot study, all patients underwent a safe and successful HIFU ablation for relapsed GD. Based on the results of the pilot study, we hypothesize that a single HIFU treatment to the thyroid gland may be as effective as our standard outpatient fixed-dose of RAI (370MBq) in causing remission of GD at 6-month. If our hypothesis turns out to be true, HIFU could become a