Rubina Mansoor, Syed Shakeel Raza Rizvi, Waseem Kausar, Faiza Aslam, Sibga Tul Huda.
Comparison of TSH, T4 and T3 Levels in Primary Hypothyroidism in relation to Gender and age in a Tertiary Care Hospital.
Ann Pak Inst Med Sci Jan ;7(4):186-90.

Objectives: To compare the TSH, T4 and T3 levels in primary hypothyroidism, with respect to age and sex. Study Design Cross sectional descriptive study. Study and duration: Chemical pathology laboratory Benazir Bhutto Hospital (BBH), Rawalpindi from September 2004 to February 2005. Material and Methods: The study comprised of 96 subjects including 79 females and 17 males from 5-80 years of age. History and physical examination of each patient was taken according to the predesigned Performa. The thyroid profile was tested by ELISA technique to find out the values of TSH, T4, and T3. The normal range of TSH 0.4 -- 4.5 mU/L, T4 4.6 -- 11.4 ug/dl, and T3 72 – 180 ng/dl. The results were analyzed statistically by applying independent samples t- test at 5% level of significance and ANOVA test after entering data in SPSS version 14. Results: In primary hypothyroidism the mean value of TSH, T4 and T3 were lower in females as compared to that in males; the difference was statistically highly significance with P-value of 0.002, for TSH and 0.0001 for T3 but not for T4. On further analysis according to the age groups in males and females in primary hypothyroidism the mean values of TSH showed persistently decreasing trend in both sexes. Whereas the mean values of T4 showed increasing trend as the age advanced in males, however in females the mean T4 levels decline after 40 years of age. The highest level of TSH and the lowest level of T4 were observed in the age group of 0-15 years in both and sex. The statistical test ANOVA showed highly significant P-value in different age groups among the total population (including both sexes) for TSH, T3 and T4 in primary hypothyroidism. Conclusion: The TSH, T4 and T3 levels in hypothyroidism exhibit different pattern according to the gender and age. The age wise distribution of thyroid profile in primary hypothyroidism amongst males and females showed that most severe form was found in age group of 0-15 year in both sex, and severity decreased as the age progressed. The primary hypothyroidism was more pronounced in males compared to females except in age group of above 40 years. The TSH values were inversely correlated well with T4 levels however the values of T3 were variable.

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