Thyroid Function and Cardiometabolic Risk

The Ethical Committee of the Polish Mother’s Memorial Hospital – Research Institute, Poland, approved all the procedures, applied in the present study, and fully informed, written consent was obtained from all patients (No. 34/2016).
Characteristics of patients enrolled into the study, as well as all indispensable procedures, were described in details elsewhere [14 (link)]. From ninety nine (99) euthyroid female inpatients with thyroid tests in reference ranges (TSH 0.27–4.2 mIU/l; free thyroxine (FT4) 0.93–1.7 ng/dl; free triiodothyronine (FT3) 2.6–4.4 pg/ml), which were considered in the previous analysis [14 (link)], ninety five (95) patients aged 18–48 years, were considered in the present statistical analysis, which did not change the basic results significantly.
The patients were divided into two groups of seventy (70) patients with low normal TSH (< 2.5 mIU/l) (Controls), and twenty five (25) patients (26.3% of the whole sample examined) with high normal TSH (≥2.5 mIU/l), which were well matched at baseline in terms of age and body mass index (BMI) (Table 1).
Table 1

Mean (±SEM) values of clinical/laboratory parameters in patients with TSH < 2.5 mIU/l and in patients with TSH ≥ 2.5 mIU/l. Statistical evaluation was performed by an unpaired Student’s t-test

Clinical/laboratory parameters	TSH < 2.5 mIU/ln = 70	TSH ≥ 2.5 mIU/ln = 25	p
Age [years]	30.95 ± 1.01	28.36 ± 1.43	0.175
Body mass [kg]	71.64 ± 2.20	74.13 ± 4.47	0.586
Height [m]	1.66 ± 0.006	1.64 ± 0.013	0.107
BMI [kg/m2]	25.85 ± 0.78	27.42 ± 1.42	0.327
Waist circumference [cm]	82.04 ± 1.83	85.04 ± 3.66	0.429
Hip circumference [cm]	103.26 ± 1.51	104.76 ± 2.87	0.625
WHR	0.79 ± 0.008	0.81 ± 0.02	0.365
FT4 [ng/dl]	1.23 ± 0.02	1.22 ± 0.03	0.765
FT3 [pg/ml]	2.91 ± 0.06	3.09 + ±0.07	0.101
TPOAb [IU/ml]	86.02 ± 18.74	31.27 ± 14.58	0.097
TgAb [IU/ml]	82.16 ± 16.81	77.91 ± 29.56	0.898
TSHRAb [IU/l]	0.45 ± 0.035	0.37 ± 0.03	0.185
Cholesterol [mg/dl]	176.96 ± 3.85	179.36 ± 6.28	0.748
HDLC [mg/dl]	57.06 ± 1.62	53.84 ± 2.90	0.319
LDLC [mg/dl]	96.41 ± 3.21	101.84 ± 5.79	0.398
HDLC/Cholesterol	0.33 ± 0.01	0.31 ± 0.02	0.281
TGs [mg/dl]	112.03 ± 7.98	113.40 ± 15.63	0.933
Glucose [mg/dl]	83.01 ± 0.83	84.20 ± 1.54	0.479
CRP [mg/dl]	0.76 ± 0.05	0.96 ± 0.16	0.093
Iron [μg/dl]	114.07 ± 4.82	102.76 ± 8.37	0.237
Lipid peroxidation [MDA + 4-HDA (nmol/ml)]	2.53 ± 0.09	2.96 ± 0.16	0.020
MBL [ng/ml]	1240.26 ± 63.95	984.93 ± 85.18	0.034

Nineteen patients were previously diagnosed to be hypothyroid, therefore they were treated with L-thyroxine (25–150 μg daily).