Endemic cretinism includes two syndromes: a more common neurological disorder with brain damage, deaf mutism, squint and spastic paresis of the legs and a less common syndrome of severe hypothyroidism, growth retardation and less severe mental defect. Both conditions are due to dietary iodine deficiency and can be prevented by correction of iodine deficiency before pregnancy. Endemic cretinism ...

Findly (1908) and Mellanby (1919) clearly demonstrated that rickets occurred in young animals fed on a diet containing an insufficient amount of certain substances now known as the “antirachitic vitamine.” As a result of this, the British Medical Research Committee announced that rickets is a deficiency disease due to a lack in the diet of an anti-rachitic factor. For literature up to 1923, cov...

How soon can the diagnosis of congenital cretinism be made? Isolated cases have been diagnosed at birth (Abels, 1911). There is a photograph in Potter's (1952) monograph showing an infant at the age of I month with the typical facies; the case had been diagnosed and, judging by a later view, successfully treated by McIntosh (1952). Wieland (1940), who has great experience, claims that he observ...

Sir Robert McCarrison's work on goitre, cretinism and the thyroid, begun in the western Himalayas in 1902, generated scores of scientific publications during the following thirtyfive years.1 Though that work is often considered the start of serious studies of goitre and cretinism in South Asia, in fact the use of iodine in goitre treatment in this region was noted by Commissioner David Scott at...

A study of four successive siblings, age 9, 12, 14 and 16 years with cretinism associated with congenitial central hypothyroidism (central cretinism), born to a mother in the endemic goitre region of the Jos Plateau, Nigeria, is presented. Biochemically, the defects were characterized by abnormally low basal thyroxine, triiodothyronine and thyroid stimulating hormone, as well as refractory TSH ...