2023 · Thyroid : official journal of the American Thyroid Association · paywalled
Thyrotropin Screening of Newborns: Before or After 72 Hours of Life? Before Discharge or at Home?
Boros et al.
The finding, in our words
In term newborns, measuring thyroid-stimulating hormone from dried blood spots before 72 hours of life is as accurate as later sampling and enables treatment of positive cases around 6 days instead of 8.5 days, without increasing false positives; however, home sampling delays laboratory receipt and yields more unusable samples than hospital sampling.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
Enhanced visual and textual guidance significantly improved the quality of dried blood spots self-collected by children and adolescents, increasing the proportion of acceptable cards from 47.6% to 86.6%, which supports the feasibility of home sampling for therapeutic drug monitoring.
In a study of 46 perinatal nicotine users, dried blood spots and saliva were used weekly to measure reproductive hormones, finding that lower postpartum estradiol and greater peripartum declines in oxytocin were associated with increased nicotine craving and use. This demonstrates the feasibility of decentralised microsampling and remote surveys for longitudinal hormone tracking in vulnerable populations.
Among 8007 neonates screened using dried blood spots, the study identified prevalence rates for congenital hypothyroidism (1:2002), congenital adrenal hyperplasia (1:2002) and G6PD deficiency (1:900), with abnormal results confirmed by venous sampling. This demonstrates the practical utility of microsampling for decentralised newborn screening and subsequent clinical management.
Analysis of dried blood spots from 813 newborns demonstrated that extremely preterm infants have markedly elevated corticosterone and 17-hydroxyprogesterone, with the latter showing the strongest inverse correlation with gestational age, indicating these precursors better reflect adrenal immaturity than cortisol alone. This validates DBS as a practical tool for guiding postnatal steroid therapy in preterm infants by helping clinicians distinguish physiological adrenal immaturity from true insufficiency.
Home DBS sampling gave testosterone results that agreed well with venous blood in men on intramuscular testosterone undecanoate, but showed falsely high values in those using topical gel, likely from skin contamination. Patients preferred home collection for its convenience, suggesting DBS is viable for decentralised monitoring of injectable testosterone if patients are taught proper technique.