Thyroxine, Thyrotropin, And Age in a Euthyroid Hospital Patient Population (Laboratory Management‪)‬

The rapid evolution in thyroid function testing (TFT) in the past decade [1] has left some clinicians and laboratorians still skeptical [2] of the value of the contemporary assays' results and of their value in the diagnostic process. (1) As a preliminary phase to a definitive study to validate a thyrotropin (TSH)-based TFT algorithm [3], we also investigated the influence of age and other factors on TSH and free thyroxine (FT4) with the Ciba Corning ACS:180 assay (Ciba Corning Diagnostics) in a suburban hospital population. This study was undertaken at Western Hospital, Melbourne, Australia. The hospital services 600 000 people in Melbourne's industrial west. It provides complete pediatric, adult medicine and surgery, obstetrics and gynecology, psychiatric, and geriatric services to both inpatients and ambulatory outpatients. It draws patients from the surrounding general practitioner-treated pool. There are no large private hospitals in the area and no areas of large personal wealth. As a result the hospital patients uniformly represent the regional population. The ethnic composition of the population is -70% Caucasian and 30% Asian. There is a negligible negroid component and there are a few aboriginal Australians.