Thyroid during Pregnancy - What to do?

While thyroid problems could be bad for your body during pregnancy as well as affecting your baby, you don t need to make any major changes to your lifestyle and medications. It is important, however, to ensure that you go for regular thyroid hormone checkups as advised by your gynaecologist. Even if you have a history of thyroid problems, as long as the thyroid hormone levels are in check, you don t need to do anything drastic.

The problems with detecting thyroid during pregnancy, especially from the second trimester onwards, are due to the similarity in symptoms with both the conditions. The common symptoms of thyroid problems are fatigue, heat intolerance, increased or irregular heart rate among others. These are the symptoms which are exhibited even during normal pregnancies. Thus you should visit your doctor and get you thyroid levels checked for even the slightest variations in TSH (Thyroid Stimulating Hormone) which may signal a thyroid disorder.

If you suffer from hypothyroidism or the lack of thyroid hormones, thyroid replacement therapy is one of the recommended remedies even if you are pregnant. Thyroid hormones don t damage your baby s development at all. The resultant conditions caused by the lack of the thyroid hormone may be damaging to the fetus instead of the medication.

Even after you have given birth, there are a lot of changes your body will still go through and that may also upset thyroid levels. Reversely, there have been cases that after giving birth, thyroid levels have been disturbed resulting in severe blood loss within the first day of childbirth (postpartum hemorrhage). Continued problems may result in anemia (deficiency of red blood cells in the blood) and thus you have to be careful even after giving birth and ensure that hormonal levels remain in control even then.