Abstract:
Spot urinary iodine concentrations (UIC)are presented for 248 individuals from western Kenya with paired drinking water collected between 2016and 2018. The median UIC was 271lgL-1, ranging from 9 to 3146lgL-1, unadjusted for hydration status/dilution. From these data, 12% were potentially iodine deficient (\100lgL-1), whilst 44% were considered to have an excess iodine intake([300lgL-1). The application of hydration status/urinary dilution correction methods was evaluated forUICs, using creatinine, osmolality and specific gravity. The use of specific gravity correction for spot urine samples to account for hydration status/urinary dilution presents a practical approach for studies with limited budgets, rather than relying on unadjusted UICs, 24 h sampling, use of significantly large samplesize in a cross-sectional study and other reportedmeasures to smooth out the urinary dilution effect.Urinary corrections did influence boundary assess-ment for deficiency–sufficiency–excess for this group of participants, ranging from 31 to 44% having excess iodine intake, albeit for a study of this size. However,comparison of the correction methods did highlight that 22% of the variation in UICs was due to urinary dilution, highlighting the need for such correction,although creatinine performed poorly, yet specific gravity as a low-cost method was comparable to osmolality corrections as the often stated ‘goldstandard’ metric for urinary concentration. Paired drinking water samples contained a median iodine concentration of 3.2lgL-1(0.2–304.1lgL-1). A weak correlation was observed between UIC and water-I concentrations (R= 0.11).