Following the ITEDS meeting in Vancouver in June 2013, to which a number of members of EUGOGO had been invited, there was a meeting of 9 members from the executive committees of both organisations.
All those present agreed that the development of better evaluation systems is of foremost importance in thyroid orbitopathy: to improve patient care, to progress research in this field, and to allow the potential for future collaboration between ITEDS and EUGOGO.
There is a pressing need for greater accuracy both in identifying disease phase and in recording change in severity, including change predictive of progression. Assessments adopted should undergo rigorous reproducibility testing and there should be patient involvement in the development of severity assessments, particularly to validate the meaningfulness of a given measure as a relevant patient outcome. It was recognised that there are domains within thyroid orbitopathy, and that outcomes should also reflect change within given domains.
The logical next step is therefore to proceed jointly to work on improved assessment systems.