LAUSR

We had the opportunity to review the recently published manuscript of an esteemed group of scientists led by Dr Deniz Karcaaltincaba, who primarily aimed to reveal the prevalence of subclinical and overt hypothyroidism during pregnancy and their association with maternal age among Turkish population, in their cross-sectional study. They compared different cutoffs for TSH. First of all, in this research the authors did not mention or investigated the perinatal outcomes, such as gestational diabetes, pregnancy-induced hypertension, premature labour, antepartum haemorrhage, abruption of the placenta, premature rupture of the membranes, small for gestational age, stillbirth or foetal death [1], which would be better to elucidate this prospective research and would be beneficial to show which cut of value is better to estimate perinatal outcomes. Also, they mentioned just age groups disregarding the possible effect of multiparity on hypothyroidism as well [2]. Besides, thyroid peroxidase and thyroglobulin antibodies were not investigated especially in subclinical hypothyroidism during pregnancy, which are considered as high risk factors for pregnancy complications [3]. As a conclusion, the authors declare that universal screening of pregnant women based on ATA (2011) and ES (2012) criteria could lead to diagnosis of hypothyroidism nearly one in four women among Turkish population and when ATA 2017 threshold was applied, prevalence of hypothyroidism decreased approximately 10 times. The authors postulated that ATA 2017 criteria seemed to be more appropriate for the Turkish population. However, how this end result could be extracted from this research without comparing perinatal outcomes. Because of the threshold increase it would not be surprising to detect less patients with hypothyroidism, but without knowing the outcomes we cannot conclude which criteria are beneficial, though. Nonetheless this well designed research will project further studies for the future trials, we thank to authors for this study.