Thyrotropin Screening of Newborns: Before or After 72 Hours of Life? Before Discharge or at Home?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective:Until November 2019 in Belgium, dried blood spot (DBS) sampling was performed between 72 and 120 hours of life, when a majority of newborns had already been discharged from the maternity. In November 2019, the policy for newborn screening in South Belgium changed to allow sampling as soon as 48 hours of life, with the objective to accelerate the process and to allow more sampling during the hospital stay. Our objective was to evaluate the impact of this policy modification and, in particular, to assess the effectiveness of screening for hypothyroidism based on sampling before or after 72 hours of life, as well as to compare the effectiveness of DBS collection before discharge or at home. Methods:This retrospective study included live births ≥37 weeks of gestation, screened by the Université Libre de Bruxelles Newborn Screening Center between January 2019 and December 2021. To evaluate the efficiency of early sampling, we compared thyrotropin (TSH) results for screening <72 hours and screening ≥72 hours. We also compared TSH results of DBS performed before discharge with those performed at home. Results:A total of 53,794 newborns were included. The results of 24,816 healthy newborns screened before 72 hours of life and of 28,978 healthy newborns screened between 72 and 144 hours of life were compared. The median TSH level was similar (1.50 and 1.20 mU/L, respectively). The percentage of false positives was similar (0.08% and 0.07%, respectively). Earlier sampling, before 72 hours, allowed treatment of positive cases at 6 days rather than 8.5 days. DBS sampling at home resulted in longer delay for transferring the sample to the laboratory (a median of 3.0 days for hospital sampling vs. 5.0 days for home sampling). A poorer quality of home blood sampling was observed, with 0.27% unusable samples compared with 0.06% unusable samples for hospital sampling (p < 0.001). Conclusions:In term newborns, TSH screening before discharge, as early as 48 hours of life, is a valid strategy. It allows earlier treatment of positive cases, does not increase the percentage of false positives, and results in fewer unusable samples.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".