New adventures of the median urinary iodine

Abstract

From the beginning of the 1990s until the end of the 2000s, Russian thyroidology developed under the auspice of “median ioduria”. The emergence of available techniques, such as urinary iodine analysis and the estimation of thyroid volume by ultrasonography, multiplied by the vast expanses of Russia, gave researchers an uncultivated field for epidemiological studies. In the course of the research, there were sometimes difficulties in interpreting the data identified in the epidemiological studies, which was partly due to the imperfection of the then existing international guidelines. In 2018, UNICEF and the Iodine Global Network (IGN) released updated recommendations based on an analysis of the experience and mistakes of the past 10–15 years. In his regular column, the author discusses new approaches to monitoring of iodine prophylaxis programs, in which the “median of ioduria” remains a central piece.