Graves’ disease: Hereditary peculiarities and effect of selection on its prevalence population

The features of genetic determination and natural selection of diffuse toxic goiter (DTG) are studied on the basis of the clinical and genealogical data obtained from 242 patients with thyrotoxicosis and from obstetric anamneses of 2105 healthy women and 369 women with thyrotoxicosis. On the basis of the results of genetic analysis, the conformity of thyrotoxicosis inheritance to the alternative model parameters is revealed. In this model, the penetrance of homozygotes was 78.8%, and the penetrance of heterozygotes was 17.3%. It is shown that, in the population of Kharkiv oblast, the frequency of the gene of predisposition to thyrotoxicosis has grown 0.8% per generation.