Maternal Hypothyroidism and Pregnancy Loss: Awaiting Firm Recommendations on Testing and Treatment.

Copyright: © 2013 Lovegreen J, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Since up to 75% of fertilized ova and at least 15% of clinicallyrecognized pregnancies do not survive to birth, spontaneous loss is the most common complication of human pregnancy. The majority of pregnancy losses occur prior to clinical detection. Set against this startlingly high background, spontaneous loss of two pregnancies occurs in approximately 1% of pregnancies and loss of three or more pregnancies in 1 in 300 couples. Although isolated fetal aneuploidy is certainly etiologic in many pre-clinical and clinical losses, other causes have been suggested. In the last 15 years, there has been an increasing interest in the role of thyroid dysfunction and in thyroid autoimmunity in patients with pregnancy wastage and many clinicians have instituted thyroid-related testing and treatment protocols based on this growing body of literature. It is important to re-examine the evidence for these interventions and to consider risk: benefit balances in acting on the existing literature.