Prevalence of Anti Thyroid Peroxidase Antibody in Hypothyroid Patient.

Medicine

Background: Anti- Thyroid perioxidase (TPO) autoantibodies are very important in diagnosis of autoimmune thyroid diseases. It can be used as predictor of its clinical course from subclinical to overt hypothyroidism. Thus this study was conducted to describe the clinical manifestations of chronic Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and prevalence of Anti TPO Antibodies in a population suffering from primary hypothyroidism. Methodology: The study was a hospital based, cross sectional study involving 50 cases, who presented with primary hypothyroidism to endocrine and medicine outpatient department between August 2015 to August 2016. The patients’ history, physical examination, routine blood investigations and anti TPO Ab testing was done. Statistical analysis was done using SPSS 16 software. Results: Among 50 cases of primary hypothyroidism, 14 (28%) had TPO antibody positive. Female patients were more likely to be TPO antibody positive (37% vs 6.67% : F vs M). TPO positive patients had high mean TSH value (26.61 vs 13.39) as compared to that of TPO negative patients which was statistically significant (p<0.05). The most frequent symptoms of TPO positive patients were lethargy, tingling sensation and weight gain and the most frequent signs were facial puffiness neck swelling and non-pitting pedal edema. Conclusions: Hashimoto`s thyroiditis was the common cause of primary hypothyroidism in the study. It could not be differentiated on the basis of clinical presentation. Anti TPO Antibodies testing should be done in subclinical hypothyroidism.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.