Endocrine Abstracts

Aims: Hypothyroidism is a common disease and important in terms of community health. To increase the awareness of patients is an important issue in the healthcare process. In this study, it was aimed to determine the level of awareness and the factors affecting the awareness in the patients with hypothyroidism.

Methods: A questionnaire was conducted to patients diagnosed with hypothyroidism who were applied to the Okmeydanı Education and Research Hospital internal medicine and endocrinology outpatient clinics, aged over 18 years, diagnosed at least three months ago, had no thyroid malignancy and weren’t pregnant. The relationship between awareness level and follow-up/treatment parameters and sociodemographic characteristics is examined.

Results: A total of 258 patients were included in the study, 221 (85.7%) female and 37 male (14.3%). The mean age was 53±14.3 years and the TSH mean level was 5.8 mIU/l. The majority of the participants were primary school graduates, low-income and have disease duration over 5 years. There was no statistically significant difference between the number of total correct answer and follow-up frequency, family history of thyroid disease, marital status and smoking status (P> 0.05). There was a statistically significant difference between the level of awareness and age, sex, education level and income level (P<0.05). The younger age group with higher education and income levels answered more questions correctly, a higher level of awareness was found in female patients. 54.7% of patients answered more than half of the questions incorrectly. While 70.5% of the participants knew the definition of hypothyroidism, only 42.6% had information about iodine deficiency. The rate of those who knew that thyroid replacement should not be stopped during pregnancy was 27.5% and who knew that thyroid hormones affected fetal intelligence development was 21.7%. Patients considered that levothyroxine should be used in the morning (84.1%) and on an empty stomach (88.4%), while they thought that it could be used in combination iron products (72.1%) and proton pump inhibitors (64.7%).

Conclusions: As a result of our study, it was concluded that there is not enough level of awareness about the diseases in hypothyroid patients. In order to increase the level of awareness, it has come to the conclusion that there should be a period of time for informing during the outpatient visits and this process should be supported by other methods like web pages, brochures, patient education programs, media programs.

Keywords: hypothyroidism, level of awareness, questionnaire