(Press-News.org) Chevy Chase, MD—Pregnant women who have thyroid disorders face greater risk of preterm birth and other complications that have short- and long-term consequences for the health of mother and child, according to a recent study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM).
The risk of complications is heightened for both women who have underactive thyroid glands – a condition known as hypothyroidism – and those with overactive thyroid glands, or hyperthyroidism. Up to four percent of all pregnancies involve mothers with thyroid conditions.
"In the United States, at least 80,000 pregnant women each year have thyroid diseases," said the study's lead author, Tuija Männistö, MD, PhD, of the National Institutes of Health's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). "These women are at increased risk of having serious adverse pregnancy outcomes, including hypertension and preterm birth. They also have a higher rate of labor inductions and other birth interventions."
The retrospective cohort study analyzed electronic medical records and 223,512 pregnancies where a single child was born to determine the rate of complications among women with thyroid conditions. The data was taken from the Consortium on Safe Labor study performed from 2002-2008. The study found women who had thyroid conditions were more likely to develop preeclampsia and tended to be admitted to the intensive care unit more frequently. Women with hypothyroidism, the most common thyroid disease in pregnancy, also were more likely to develop gestational diabetes and had a higher rate of cesarean delivery.
"Women need appropriate thyroid hormone levels to support a healthy pregnancy, so it is very important to carefully monitor expecting mothers who have thyroid diseases," said one of the study's authors, Pauline Mendola, PhD, of the NIH's NICHD. "We also need more research to identify ways to reduce the risks these women currently face."
The Endocrine Society's clinical practice guidelines for managing thyroid dysfunction during pregnancy and postpartum are available online at http://www.endo-society.org/guidelines/upload/Thyroid-Exec-Summ.pdf.
###
Other researchers working on the study include: J. Grewal, Y. Xie, Z. Chen, and S.K. Laughon of the NIH's NICHD.
The article, "Thyroid Diseases and Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes in a Contemporary U.S. Cohort," was published online on May 29.
Founded in 1916, The Endocrine Society is the world's oldest, largest and most active organization devoted to research on hormones and the clinical practice of endocrinology. Today, The Endocrine Society's membership consists of over 16,000 scientists, physicians, educators, nurses and students in more than 100 countries. Society members represent all basic, applied and clinical interests in endocrinology. The Endocrine Society is based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. To learn more about the Society and the field of endocrinology, visit our site at http://www.endo-society.org. Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/#!/EndoMedia.
END
The way in which stars evolve and end their lives was for many years considered to be well understood. Detailed computer models predicted that stars of a similar mass to the Sun would have a period towards the ends of their lives -- called the asymptotic giant branch, or AGB [1] -- when they undergo a final burst of nuclear burning and puff off a lot of their mass in the form of gas and dust.
This expelled material [2] goes on to form the next generations of stars and this cycle of mass loss and rebirth is vital to explain the evolving chemistry of the Universe. This ...
The physics behind some of the most extraordinary stellar objects in the Universe just became even more puzzling.
A group of astronomers led by McGill researchers using NASA's Swift satellite have discovered a new kind of glitch in the cosmos, specifically in the rotation of a neutron star.
Neutron stars are among the densest objects in the observable universe; higher densities are found only in their close cousins, black holes. A typical neutron star packs as much mass as half-a-million Earths within a diameter of only about 20 kilometers. A teaspoonful of neutron ...
Astrophysicists have found that contrary to decades of orthodoxy, stars with a high sodium content die before reaching the final, spectacular stages of life.
In a study published today in Nature, an international group of researchers led by Dr Simon Campbell of the Monash Centre for Astrophysics (MoCA), used the European Southern Observatory's 'Very Large Telescope' (VLT) to observe NGC 6752, a globular cluster of stars in our galaxy, 13,000 light years from Earth.
They found that 70 per cent of stars in the tightly bound group fail to reach the final red giant phase. ...
Researchers have identified a sub-group of cells that could contribute to prostate cancer recurrence, opening up new ways to treat the disease, which claims more than 3000 lives a year in Australia.
Published today in Science Translational Medicine, a study led by Monash University researchers has found prostate cancer cells that survive androgen withdrawal treatment. Previously unidentified, these cells are potential targets for future treatments. As they are present early in disease development, there is the possibility of therapy before the cancer reaches the aggressive, ...
A study at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine identified a protein that is responsible for regulating blood vessel growth by mediating the efficient removal of cholesterol from the cells. Unregulated development of blood vessels can feed the growth of tumors.
The work, led by Yury Miller, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine at UC San Diego, will be published in the advance online edition of the journal Nature on May 29.
Cholesterol is a structural component of the cell and is indispensable for normal cellular function, although its excess ...
University Park, PA -- One of the densest objects in the universe, a neutron star about 10,000 light years from Earth, has been discovered suddenly putting the brakes on its spinning speed. The event is a mystery that holds important clues for understanding how matter reacts when it is squeezed more tightly than the density of an atomic nucleus -- a state that no laboratory on Earth has achieved. The discovery, by an international team of scientists that includes a Penn State University astronomer, will be published in the journal Nature on 30 May 2013.
The scientists ...
HOUSTON -- (May 30, 2013) – In some neurodegenerative diseases, and specifically in a devastating inherited condition called spinocerebellar ataxia 1 (SCA1), the answer may not be an "all-or-nothing," said a collaboration of researchers from Baylor College of Medicine, the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children's Hospital and the University of Minnesota in a report that appears online in the journal Nature. The problem might be solved with just a little less.
"If you can only decrease the levels of ataxin-1 (the protein involved in SCA1) ...
UCLA research has shown that that children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder are far more likely than other kids to develop serious substance abuse problems as adolescents and adults. But do stimulant medications used to treat ADHD contribute to the risk?
UCLA psychologists have conducted the most comprehensive assessment ever on this question and have found that children with ADHD who take medications such as Ritalin and Adderall are at no greater risk of using alcohol, marijuana, nicotine or cocaine later in life than kids with ADHD who don't take these ...
During the last ice age, when thick ice covered the Arctic, many scientists assumed that the deep currents below that feed the North Atlantic Ocean and help drive global ocean currents slowed or even stopped. But in a new study in Nature, researchers show that the deep Arctic Ocean has been churning briskly for the last 35,000 years, through the chill of the last ice age and warmth of modern times, suggesting that at least one arm of the system of global ocean currents that move heat around the planet has behaved similarly under vastly different climates.
"The Arctic ...
Charles H. Hennekens, MD, DrPH, the first Sir Richard Doll professor and senior academic advisor to the dean in the Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine at Florida Atlantic University has published in the current issue of the Lancet the most comprehensive analyses of the benefits and risks of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), which include cyclo-oxygenase-2 inhibitors (coxibs).
Hennekens and colleagues from around the world, under the direction of the Clinical Trial Service and Epidemiology Studies Unit at the University of Oxford, conducted a world-wide ...
