Abstract
Thyroid dysfunctions are common endocrine problems. They are often misdiagnosed, misunderstood, and frequently overlooked. These disorders affect almost every aspect of health. Most of them remain undetected because the clinical assessment alone lacks both sensitivity and specificity. As it is not sufficient enough we require the biochemical tests to confirm the diagnosis. As a consequence there is still great interest in new biomarkers that complement existing diagnostic tools. Osteopontin, a glycoprotein that can be detected in plasma, was found to be upregulated in several patients with hyperthyroidism and downregulated in hypothyroid patients so it may represent a new biomarker. 100 patients with thyroid dysfunctions (50 hyperthyroid, 50 hypothyroid) and 100 normal subjects were included in the study. Osteopontin and other clinical parameters for diagnosis of thyroid disorders were measured. Osteopontin is positively correlated with T3 and T4 (r = 0.62 and r = 0.75 respectively) while it is negatively correlated with thyroid stimulating hormone (r = −0.52) showing a significant correlation (p-value <0.001). Our findings suggest that osteopontin might be useful as a novel prognostic biomarker in patients with impaired thyroid function.
Highlights
Thyroid dysfunctions are the most common endocrine problems encountered in our clinical and endocrinology laboratory
More information is required to understand the function of osteopontin in different disease states. Keeping this in mind we investigated changes in serum oosteopontin with thyroid hormones and thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) levels induced by thyroid function disorders
The pattern of change in serum osteopontin levels observed in our study i.e. elevated in hyperthyroidism and decreased in hypothyroidism, may be due to these various cell processes going on in the thyroid gland under the influence of osteopontin, yet the exact function of osteopontin in thyroid dysfunction has not been determined
Summary
Thyroid dysfunctions are the most common endocrine problems encountered in our clinical and endocrinology laboratory. Hyperthyroidism and hypothyroidism together are responsible for considerable morbidity in over 110 countries of the world among them most are developing countries [1]. The prevalence of these disorders in life time is approximately 5–10% [2]. Thyroid diseases are very often misdiagnosed, misunderstood, and frequently overlooked. They affect almost every aspect of health. Most of them remain undetected because the clinical assessment alone has less sensitivity and specificity and can suspect only up to 40% of symptomatic thyroid disorders. The biochemical tests can be used to confirm the diagnosis [6]
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