Statistical analysis
Analysis of the data was performed using STATISTICA software (V.7.0 Stat Soft Inc., Tulsa, OK, USA). Descriptive statistics are presented as mean with standard deviation (SD) and medians, with 25th and 75th percentiles.Spearman’s correlation coefficient was used for the comparison of iodine intake estimated from 24-h urine and 24-h dietary recall. Bland–Altman plots were constructed to evaluate the agreement between the two iodine intake measurement techniques applied.Mann–Whitney One-way analysis of variance with the Kruskal–Wallis test and Dunn’s multiple comparison post-test was used to explore differences between groups. The level of significance was defined as a 