Abstract
Thyroid hormone is essential for normal brain development including structures critical for visual processing. While chick and rodent models have demonstrated abnormal visual development following prenatal thyroid hormone loss, comparable data do not exist in the human. To determine whether human infants with intrauterine and early postnatal thyroid hormone insufficiencies have compromised visual abilities, we investigated contrast sensitivity and visual acuity development in 13 infant offspring of women with hypothyroidism during pregnancy (HYPO), 16 preterm infants born between 32 and 35 weeks gestation, 12 infants with congenital hypothyroidism (CH), and 20 typically developing infants. All were assessed with the sweep visual evoked potential technique at 3, 4.5, and 6 months (corrected) age. Results showed significantly reduced contrast sensitivity but normal visual acuity in HYPO and CH groups relative to controls (p < 0.003 and p < 0.05 respectively). Stratification of the HYPO group into subgroups based on maternal TSH levels during the first half of pregnancy revealed lower contrast sensitivities for infants whose mothers' TSH values were above than below the median (p < 0.05). In the CH group, those with an absent thyroid gland and/or a newborn TSH value above 200 mIU/L had lower contrast sensitivities than did those with other etiologies or TSH levels below 100 mIU/L (p < 0.05). There were no significant effects involving the preterm group. These results indicate that thyroid hormone is important for human visual development.
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Abbreviations
- CH:
-
congenital hypothyroidism
- COD:
-
coefficient of determination
- HSC:
-
The Hospital for Sick Children
- HYPO:
-
maternal hypothyroidism
- PREM:
-
preterm birth
- TH:
-
thyroid hormone
- VEP:
-
visual evoked potential
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Acknowledgements
The work was obtained in partial fulfillment of G.M. doctoral thesis.
Portions of this paper were presented at conferences of the American Thyroid Association, September 2002, Los Angeles, CA; Association of Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, May 2002, Fort Lauderdale, FL; the International Society of Infant Studies, April 2004, Chicago, IL; the International Neuropsychology Society, February 2003, Honolulu, HI; Neurotoxicology, February 2004, Honolulu, HI.
We are indebted to Julie Cunningham for recruiting and scheduling the children and to Adena Perron, who assisted in testing. We also thank Dr. Wendy Wolfman, who allowed us to recruit control mothers through her obstetrics practice; Lori Brnjac, who recruited many of the children with CH; Dr. Michael Simone, from whom we obtained two of the CH cases; and the Motherisk Program at HSC, from which we recruited the hypothyroid women. We are also extremely grateful to Dr. Anthony Norcia and members of his laboratory, who provided the software as well as the direction and guidance in using the Power Diva System. Finally, we thank all of the mothers and their infants who so willingly participated in this research.
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This work was supported by a RESTRACOMP scholarship through the Research Institute of The Hospital for Sick Children (G.M.), an operating grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (J.R.), and a National Science and Engineering Research Council postdoctoral fellowship (G.M.).
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Mirabella, G., Westall, C., Asztalos, E. et al. Development of Contrast Sensitivity in Infants with Prenatal and Neonatal Thyroid Hormone Insufficiencies. Pediatr Res 57, 902–907 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1203/01.PDR.0000157681.38042.B4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1203/01.PDR.0000157681.38042.B4
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