Quite a lot of interesting works in this issue, as usual, at least for a clinical endocrinologist because thyroid disease is so frequent in our practice:
Levothyroxine therapy improves neurodevelopment in extremely premature neonates. Infants born below 28 weeks' gestations were treated woth levothyroxine or placebo and their neurodevelopmental outcomes were tested with Bayley III indexes at 42 months. They saw improvements in motor, language and cognition domains, but they admit the effect is not so strong to recommend change in clinical practice.
Myocardial infarction and stroke increased in hyperthyroidism. Hyun Jung Kim studied a cohort of 59,021hyperthyroid patients comparing it with 1,180,420 matched controls. Adjusted hazard ratios (HRs) for myocardial infarction (1.16) and ischemic stroke (1.12) was significantly higher in hyperthyroidism. In subgroup analysis, it remained significant only for older (>50), lean and females.
Basal calcitonin with novel essays superior to stimulated in detection of medullary thyroid cancer. In the last decade new methods for monomeric calcitonin detection have appeared (immunochemiluminometric assays). Martin B Niederle et al from Austria compared this method to stimulation tests in thyroid nodules with high basal calcitonin. They found basal CT superior with cut point for MCT and neck metastasis of 43 and 100 pg/mL in males and 23 and 85 in females.
Active surveillance for low risk thyroid carcinomas in Colombia. Alvaro Sanabria published his 24 month experience of surveillance of 103 Bethesda low risk (<15 mm, encapsulated, without nodes) V/VI nodules. Only about 25% grew > 3 mm diameters or >50% volume, and only 12,7% wre operated.
Nondiagnostic FNAB is more frequent with repeated biopsy. Results of 2234 FNAB were diagnostic in 84, 57 and 42% of cases in the first, second or third biopsy, respectively. Risk of malignancy was 8%, regardless of number of rebiopsies.
Metabolic disorders and urinary iodine. Jin from Shenyang found that prevalence of metabolic disorders (dislipidemia, hyperglycemia) and hypertension is u-shaped correlated with urinary iodine, with lowest risks between 100 and 500 mcg/d.
If you are in the mood of more science, https://www.liebertpub.com/toc/thy/30/7
