Thyroid gland diseases are a public health problem worldwide. Imbalance in the regulation of thyroid gland hormones can cause many disorders that range from a small goiter to life threatening diseases, such as thyroid cancer. Thyroid dysfunction both hyper and hypothyroidism can affect circulatory system by affecting cardiac output, cardiac contractility, blood pressure, vascular resistance and rhythm disturbance which can further cause heart failure, fibrillation, congestive heart failure and blood pressure. Westernization and nutrition transition in Arab world have increased the burden of adeno-carcinomas, including thyroid cancer. This review aims to present the aggregated burden, risk factors and prognosis of various thyroid diseases prevalent in Arab countries. An electronic databases search was conducted using PubMed in addition to searching of accessible local journals in Arab world, using keywords and terms like epidemiology, burden, odds, risks, etc. After applying exclusion and inclusion criteria, 21 articles were selected to include in this review. The review showed that the prevalence of different types of thyroid disease varied between the reported studies in Arab world ranging from 6.18 to 47.34% prevalence of goiter reported by several studies conducted in Arab world, such as Egypt, Algeria and Bahrain with 25.25, 86 and 1.7%, respectively. Gender, dietary factors, iodine deficiency, family history, diabetes and x-ray radiation were reported as risk factors associated with different type of thyroid diseases. The most prevalence of thyroid disease was concluded to be thyroid lesions which varied in different regions of Arab and the burden of thyroid cancer is very high and very common in different Arab region, and further longitudinal studies are still needed to investigate the prognosis and determinants of these thyroid diseases in the Arab world.
Key words: Thyroid disease, prevalence, burden, odds, odds ratio, risk factors.
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