The thyroid gland is under stress and strain from pregnancy alone, it has to work about half again as hard to produce the hormones to keep up with the demand of pregnancy, so it is very important for a pregnant patient. As for background information your thyroid gland runs your metabolism, and it is subject to stresses from environmental factors, genetic predisposition and even viral infections. Thyroid function also directly and indirectly affects whether you get pregnant and how healthy that pregnancy is. To accommodate the need for extra thyroid hormone in pregnancy the thyroid gland enlarges but it shouldn't take on actual nodules. Higher miscarriage rates, more frequent preterm deliveries, increased risk of high blood pressure, more patients becoming diabetic and having diabetic complications, higher risk for placental problems like premature separation, and adverse fetal effects have all been reported with thyroid disease when you are pregnant! In women with thyroid disease at least half of implanted embryos will not survive to delivery,with most of these pregnancy losses occur in the first trimester.Although there are many contributing factors both having high and low thyroid tests are actually associated with miscarriages.
Hypo- and hyperthyroidism are both associated with increased pregnancy loss. If a patient has an autoimmune problem with her pregnancy then she's also more likely to miscarry. The TSH test will test your over all thyroid function the best if you were going to pick one test to have, and the level of normal for TSH will vary with the trimester of pregnancy. But thyroid peroxidase antibody levels have been most closely associated with miscarriages and diabetes in pregnancy. Women are more likely than men to have antibodies against the thyroid, and with age the frequency increases, so having a pregnancy when you are older predisposes you to having a pregnancy with thyroid problems. We can explain this greater need for thyroid hormone in pregnancy. The placenta takes some hormone and the fetus takes some thyroid hormone, as well as a need for the increased weight and nutrition of pregnancy for our bodies to accommodate a pregnancy.. At 6 weeks of pregnancy there is already evidence of our thyroid hormone in the fetus, as the fetus itself doesn't really make it's own until 20 weeks. So some experts argue that thyroid hormone levels in pregnancy should be even higher than in the non-pregnant woman.Then a group from the University of Texas Southwestern reporting tin the November 2011 American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology has now found that the more pregnancies a woman has the more she has elevated antibody levels against components of the thyroid. Specifically it has now been shown that it may be related to certain characteristics of the fetus and what their cells actually were. And the more pregnancies a woman has had the more anti-thhyroid peroxidase antibodies she would have. So those women, with more pregnancies are even more likely to have thyroid problems in pregnancy, and after pregnancy, no matter how long that pregnancy actually lasted. It may be recommended for women who have had a miscarriage to look into their thyroid levels carefully before a next pregnancy.Something else to talk to your gyno about!
I tried desiccated porcine thyroid tablets in hopes of combating my near impossible battle of weight loss and my results were fabulous to say the least. It seems that my weight loss problems have dissipated and figure has reappeared from within.
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