Intellectual performance of children of mothers with thyroid disease in pregnancy (first results of research)
Abstract
The link between impaired neurodevelopment and thyroid dysfunction after birth has been well-known for more than 100 years. The general agreement about the importance of thyroid hormones for the development of CNS of a fetus in the second and third trimester of pregnancy has been reached only 15 years ago.
Whether maternal thyroid dysfunction has negative impact on the fetus development in the first trimester of pregnancy, when the fetus is utterly dependent on maternal thyroid hormones, is unknown. Between 2004 and 2006, thyroid function tests were gathered in 1649 pregnant women of the Havlíčkův Brod area.
Eight years after this screening begun, we assessed intellectual performance in 267 children of women from the screening. Consequent selection provided a screening group A of 74 children of women with untreated thyroid dysfunction in the first trimester of pregnancy (TSH?3,5 and/or TPO-Ab?20).
Intellectual performance of these children in WISC-III was compared with control group of 132 children, whose mothers didn't show thyroid dysfunction before and during pregnancy and also after the birth. A screening group B (n=231) was also selected to provide correlations of TSH levels in first trimester of pregnancy with performance in WISC-III.
The screening group B consists of mothers with both treated and untreated thyropathy in first trimester of pregnancy and their children and of healthy mothers, in means of thyroid function, and their children. We didn't find statistically significant difference in intellectual performance of children of mothers with untreated thyropathy in the first trimester of pregnancy compared to a control group.