Preterm Infant TSH Reference Ranges from Five-Year Neonatal Screening

61.4 KB of retrospective data analyzes thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) levels in preterm infants from neonatal screening tests conducted between October 2017 and December 2022. Xing Huang authored this study to establish condition-specific TSH reference ranges and cutoffs. The work categorizes infants by gestational age, birth weight, and small-for-gestational-age status.

Use Cases

• Establish TSH cutoff values (97.5th percentile) for different gestational age and birth weight categories.
• Analyze TSH level trends across postnatal age periods, such as the peak of 7.38 μIU/mL observed in the third postnatal week.
• Compare TSH distributions (2.5th, 5th, 50th, 95th percentiles) between small-for-gestational-age and appropriate-for-gestational-age infants.
• Model the relationship between TSH levels and infant characteristics like gestational age, birth weight, and postnatal age.

Strengths

• Data covers a 5-year retrospective period from October 2017 to December 2022.
• Analysis provides specific percentile values (2.5th, 5th, 50th, 95th, 97.5th) for TSH across multiple infant categories.
• Findings include a concrete cutoff value, such as the 97.5th percentile TSH level peaking at 7.38 μIU/mL in week three.

Limitations

• Dataset is very small at 61.4 KB, suggesting limited raw data or a summary document rather than a full patient-level dataset.
• The underlying sample size of preterm infants and the number of individual TSH measurements are unknown.
• Geographic origin and institutional source of the infant data are not specified, limiting generalizability.

Provenance

Source

Xing Huang, published on figshare.

Collection Method

Retrospective analysis of neonatal blood screening test (NBST) records.

Time Range

October 2017 to December 2022.

Freshness

Data collection ended in December 2022; the study was last updated in April 2026.

Geography

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