Assessment of the iodine status of children of pre‐school age (6 months–5 years) in Rivers State, Nigeria

Abstract

The study was to determine the iodine status of preschool children in Rivers State, Nigeria. A cross‐sectional study design and an experimental design were employed in the study. The population comprised all preschool children in Rivers State. A multistage sampling procedure was used to draw a sample size of 330 preschool children. Early morning casual urine samples were collected from the pupils for the analysis of urinary iodine concentration (UIC) using the sensitive colorimetric method of the Sandell–Kelthoff reaction. The result revealed that none of the children were severely deficient, 2.41% were moderately deficient, and 36.14% were mildly deficient; 53.01% were adequate, while 4.82% were more than adequate. The study population was found to have adequate iodine based on the median UIC of 143.3 µg/L, and within the optimal (100–199 µg/L) range of iodine, strongly suggesting that iodine deficiency seems not to be a public health problem among the preschool children.