Maternal Thyroid Deficiency during Pregnancy and Subsequent Neuropsychological Development of the Child

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Abstract
Haddow et al. (Aug. 19 issue)1 suggest that screening pregnant women for hypothyroidism by measuring serum thyrotropin may be worthwhile and that treating women with serum thyrotropin concentrations at or above the 98th percentile could lead to “an increase of approximately 4 points in IQ scores” in their children. However, the results of their study should be interpreted with caution. The difference in full-scale IQ scores between children whose mothers had hypothyroidism during pregnancy and the children of matched control women is not statistically significant (103 vs. 107, P=0.06), and the results of only 2 of the 13 neuropsychological tests were significantly worse in the children of the women with hypothyroidism during pregnancy.