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More than 30 years ago, the occurrence of spontaneous autoimmune thyroiditis was observed in rodents that were made severely T-cell lymphopenic by neonatal thymectomy or by thymectomy at week five after birth together with concomitant low dose irradiation Following these reports, numerous studies have shown that manipulations that generate functional T-cell lymphopenia result in the development of a variety of organ-specific autoimmune diseases in animal models (reviewed in Impressive examples of such manipulations include: IL-2 knockout mice, that develop prominent autoimmune colitis
Hendrik Schulze‐Koops (Thu,) studied this question.