Prevalence of urinary iodine concentration among school children: in Dessie City, Ethiopia

Background: Urinary iodine is recommended by the world health organization as the main indicator to assess iodine status in a population. Despite this recommendation little is known about urinary iodine concentration in the study area. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the level of urinary iodine concentration among school-aged children.

Methods: An institution-based cross-sectional study design was used to assess the level of urinary iodine from April to June 2019 and a systematic random sampling technique was applied to select study participants. Socio-demographic characteristics were assessed using a pretested structured questionnaire and the laboratory method by Sandell-Kolthoff reaction method was used. Data were cleaned, coded, and entered into Epi data version 3.1 and then exported to SPSS version 21 software for analysis.

Result: A total of 634 study participants were enrolled in the study with a median age of 12 years (±SD = 2.0). The majority of the children were females (55.4%) and more than half of respondents report the use of iodized salt always. Median urinary iodine concentration was 158.5 μg/L (±SD = 104.1) with minimum and maximum values of 5.1 μg/L and 528.8 μg/L, respectively. The overall iodine deficiency in this study was 18.6% and severe deficiency constituted 7.4%.

Conclusions: The iodine deficiency of the school children aged 6 to 14 in the present study was 18.6% indicating high prevalence. A high proportion of iodine deficiency was observed among females and it increases as age increases. This indicates the need for an additional strategy to control iodine deficiency.