Prevalence of thyroid disorder in Down syndrome

Abstract

Thyroid function has been studied in 121 patients between 13 and 48 years old with proven Down syndrome. Chemically, hypothyroidism was found in 17 % and hyperthyroidism in 2.5 % of the patients; 18 % of patients had goiter. Thyroid antibodies were detected in 33 % of subjects studied. The abnormal findings were almost equally distributed between the sexes above 20 years of age; however, females had significantly more thyroid disease than males in the younger age group.

Capillary TSH screening programme for Down's syndrome in Scotland, 1997-2009

“…Other studies have shown a female predominance of 3:1 between infancy and adolescence,11 12 although not as high as the 4.2:1 ratio described by de Vries et al in children and adolescents with Hashimoto's thyroiditis 13. As expected in this screened population, there was a low prevalence of hypothyroid symptoms, which were reported in only one third of patients.…”

Functional Status of Thyroid Gland in Hospitalized Children With Down’s Syndrome

“…Our finding of hypothyroidism (15%) in patients with Down's syndrome is comparable with the prevalence rates of The age distribution of hypothyroidism cases is shown in Table-III. [15][16][17][18][19] The variation in prevalence in these earlier studies might be related to the age variation among the studied subjects and/or to differences in diagnostic criteria.…”

Graves' Disease in a Down's Syndrome Patient

“…Most of the large series studying thyroid function in Down's syndrome report that hypothyroidism is more common (17 to 40%) while only 0.6-2.5% of patients have hyperthyroidism [4][5][6][7][8] . It rarely presents before eight years of age.…”