Screening for thyroid dysfunction and treatment of screen-detected thyroid dysfunction in asymptomatic, community-dwelling adults: a systematic review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: This systematic review was conducted to inform the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care recommendations on screening for thyroid dysfunction (TD). The review sought to answer key questions on the benefits and harms of screening for TD, patients' values and preferences for screening, and the benefits and harms of treating screen-detected TD. METHODS: This review followed Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care methods, which include the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) approach. The search strategy used for benefits and harms of screening and treatment was an update to the 2014 review by the US Preventive Services Task Force and searched MEDLINE and the Cochrane Library. MEDLINE, Embase, ProQuest Public Health, and SCOPUS were searched for patients' values and preferences for screening. Outcomes of interest included all-cause mortality, deaths due to cardiovascular diseases, fatal and non-fatal cardiovascular events, atrial fibrillation, fractures, quality of life, cognitive function, and harms due to TD treatment. Two reviewers independently screened abstracts and full texts according to pre-determined inclusion criteria and assessed the risk of bias for each study included. Strength and quality of the evidence was assessed for each outcome. A narrative synthesis was conducted due to heterogeneity of the included studies. RESULTS: No studies were found on screening for TD, treatment of subclinical hyperthyroidism, or patients' values and preferences for screening for TD. Twenty-two studies (from 24 publications) on the treatment of TD in patients with screen-detected subclinical hypothyroidism were included. Results from the included randomized controlled trials suggested no benefit of treatment for subclinical hypothyroidism for the large majority of outcomes. We found very low-quality evidence (from two cohort studies) for a small reduction in all-cause mortality among adults < 65 or 40-70 years who were treated for TD compared to those who were not. CONCLUSIONS: This review found moderate to very low-quality evidence on the benefits and harms of treatment for subclinical hypothyroidism, with most of the evidence showing no benefit of treatment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".