DOI: 10.36347/sjams.2014.v02i02.027

Pages: 605-612

Studies have found that diabetes and thyroid disorders tend to co-occur in patients. Although this cooccurrence have been observed mainly in type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM), thyroid dysfunctions also co-occur in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) to a significant level. In the present study, we have investigated different thyroid function markers in 50 T2DM patients and 50 healthy age-sex matched controls of an urban population with mean±SD age of 41.86±6.43 and 41.54±7.88 respectively. Fasting blood glucose (FBG) (13.34±2.52 vs. 4.45±0.53) as well as mean glycosylated hemoglobin, HbA1c (%) (13.15±1.81 vs. 4.49±0.644) were significantly (p<0.001) higher in T2DM patients than control subjects. We found that serum levels of thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) (1.22±0.74 vs. 1.74±1.07; p<0.01) and free T3 (FT3) (0.99±0.24 vs. 2.74±0.75; p<0.001) were significantly lower in T2DM patients than that of control subjects. However, we did not find any significant difference in case of the serum levels of freeT4 (FT4) (15.42±2.90 vs. 15.61±2.98) between the T2DM patients and control subjects. We found that levels FBG and HbA1c were abnormally high and serum FT3 was abnormally low in T2DM patients. On the other hand, levels of TSH, FT4, antithyroglobulin (TG) and anti-thyroid peroxidase (TPO) were all almost within the normal range in T2DM patients. A significantly lower anti-TG level was found in T2DM patients than control (33.44±5.25 vs. 35.64±4.0; p<0.05). This study revealed a significant negative correlation of serum FT3 with FBG and HbA1c (r=-0.789**, p=0.000 and r=- 0.820**, p=0.000 respectively) irrespective of the groups. Findings of the present study on a small size of Bangladeshi population indicate the possibility of low FT3 syndrome in T2DM patients in which thyroid autoimmunity was not related.