Iodine deficiency: Physiological, clinical and epidemiological features, and pre-analytical considerations.

Low dietary intake is associated with severe pathologies (especially goiter and cretinism) that affect life quality. Iodine deficiency disorders are a major public health problem worldwide. In fact, 246 million school-aged children have insufficient iodine intake (data from 2012). Extrapoling this value to general population leads to the estimation that 1.9 billion people have insufficient iodine intake. So, it is crucial to interpret correctly data from iodine status survey. The World Health Organization recommends urinary iodine as the main indicator for the assessment of iodine status in epidemiological surveys. To improve the result, some considerations can be taken into account by the biologist, epidemiologist or public health physician for the realization of epidemiological surveys. After a reminder about the physiological and physiopathological feature of iodine, a description of some useful parameters was made to improve the exploration of iodine status in epidemiological surveys.