Interpreting Minor Variations in Thyroid Function or Echostructure: Treating Patients, Not Numbers or Images.

The measurement of serum hormone concentrations on automated analyzers in clinical biochemistry laboratories allows rapid turnaround times, which may have contributed to practitioners requesting these ever more frequently. Because of the high prevalence and nonspecific clinical presentation of thyroid diseases, evaluation of thyroid function figures prominently on the list of blood tests requested. At our institution, a mother-child tertiary care center, serum thyrotropin (TSH) is measured in 55 samples every day, almost 10 times more than serum cortisol (A. Djemli, personal