The frequency of hypothyroidism in Saudi community-based hospital: A retrospective single centre study

Abstract

Background and objective: Thyroid gland is one of the important organs in human body and the burden of thyroid diseases in the general population is enormous specially in females. To estimate retrospectively the frequency of hypothyroidism in Saudi community-based hospital. Design: We analyzed retrospectively 3872 participants whom are between the age 12 to 105 years. All patients were from the population of the Primary health centre at King Fahad Armed Forces Hospital, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. All data were collected on the basis of a review of electronic medical data. Patients with TSH above the normal range of TSH for our laboratory reference (4.2 MIU/L, history of hypothyroidism and taking thyroid replacement therapy were included. Patient who are pregnant were excluded. Results: Out of the initial screening of 6023 subjects, 3872 subjects were included. There were 884 (22.8 %) male and 2988 (77.2 %) were female with mean age 44.1 ± 16.3. The mean and median TSH values were 4.4 ± 8.7 and 2.6 respectively. Among them we found 1125 (29.1%) cases with hypothyroidism. Among cases of hypothyroidism, there were 964 (85.7 %) cases were female and 161 (14.3 %) were male with male to female ratio of 1 to 6.0, p < 0.0001. Cases with hypothyroidism were nonsignificantly older than cases with no hypothyroidism, 44.9 ± 16.2 vs. 43.8 ± 16.4 respectively, p = 0.06. Hypothyroidism was more prevalent in the fifth decade (32%). Hypothyroidsm was significantly more prevalent in females between the second to the sixth decades as compared to males. Male was nonsignificantly more prevalent than females in the eighth and ninth decades. Conclusion: We conclude that despite the limitations of this hospital-based retrospective study, hypothyroidism is highly prevalent in cohort of Saudis. The majority of our patients with primary hypothyroidism were young and predominantly females. These two observations remain to be validated by population-based studies. In the absence of registry data, larger cooperative studies involving diverse population samples from multiple centers could help to provide further information on the true frequency nationally. *Correspondence to: Khalid S Aljabri, Department of Endocrinology, King Fahad Armed Forces Hospital, Jeddah, PO Box 9862, Jeddah 21159, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Tel: +96-623-233-33 ext. 59200, E-mail: khalidsaljabri@yahoo.com