The incidence of platybasia in patients with hearing defects in areas of endemic goitre.

Examination of patients with different degrees of hearing loss or deafness in areas of endemic goitre has shown that more than half of the number had radiologic evidence of platybasia. The same could be found in cretins from these areas during clinical studies. Some of the findings are shown and compared with the radiological analysis of fetal skulls with physiological platybasia. These findings give strength to the assumption that a retardation in the development of the central nervous system has taken place early in fetal life as a result of the hypofunction of the fetal thyroid gland.