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Sir.—In their article "Newborn Thyroid Screening in a Municipal Hospital" (Journal 1982;136:248-250), Harris and Dreyfus pointed out the following problems that arise from the process of recall of newborns with abnormal screening results: the cost of recall of patients in the overall program, the anxiety for individual families, and the success rate in recall of patients requiring a second test. We would like to comment on some of these points in terms of our experience with neonatal screening for hypothyroidism.
First, in France, the state-mandated screening program for hypothyroidism and for phenylketonuria (PKU) is carried out in 21 area centers, geographically determined under the auspices of a national authority. All of these centers perform thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) determinations from dried blood spots. The cutoff value has been fixed to 30 μU/mL of blood.
Second, our center is one of these "regional centers" and screens 80,000 infants per year for