We appreciate the opportunity to respond to the letter recently published by Ma(Reference Ma1) regarding our paper in the British Journal of Nutrition (Reference Chen, Gao and Guo2). We believe that Ma(Reference Ma1) makes some points that deserve a clarifying response. First, concern was expressed that we did not discuss the 24-h urinary iodine concentration (UIC) variation for iodine-deficient and iodine-sufficient individuals. In this study, the study objects are college students, according to the WHO to determine the iodine nutritional status of the range of urinary iodine(3), the population is generally at the appropriate level of iodine. In the future, our work will also explore the variation of 24-h UIC in people with iodine deficiency and iodine excess. At the same time, we think that the scope of application is wider than the determination results of iodine-adequate people.
Ma(Reference Ma1) also expressed to consider if the adjustment of UIC by creatinine excretion (iodine:creatinine ratio) could be used to decrease or increase intra- and inter-individual variation of urinary iodine and how this could further influence UIC distribution spread. We think this is a good suggestion, and we have tried to use urinary creatinine as a separate indicator to evaluate children’s iodine nutrition(Reference Chen, Li and Guo4,Reference Wang, Du and Lin5) , but it is not involved in this survey. Our next work will try to use more evaluation indicators to evaluate the iodine nutrition status of different populations.
We appreciate Ma’s interest in our work and the opportunity to conduct alternative analyses to address the stated concerns.
