Thyroid Antibodies in Gestational Diabetes

Objectives- To compare the prevalence of thyroid antibodies in pregnant women with and those without GDM, determine the thyroid antibodies in women with abnormal thyroid hormones and the risk factors for thyroid antibodies in GDM. Materials And Methods- This was a comparative cross-sectional study conducted at the Jos University Teaching Hospital, Jos, Nigeria. In this study 140 participants comprising 70 women with GDM and 70 normoglycemic pregnant women were recruited by simple consecutive sampling between July 2020 and January 2021. The serum anti-TPO, anti-Tg, TSH, fT3 and fT4 were analysed with Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA) kits and then interpreted. The data were analysed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (IBM-SPSS) software version 26. Results- The prevalence of anti-TPO was higher in the GDM group (4.3%) than the control group (1.4%) while the prevalence of anti-Tg was the same (4.3%) in both groups, none of these differences were statistically significant. Subclinical hypothyroidism accounted for 34.3% of thyroid hormone disorder among women with GDM. Among GDM patients with subclinical hypothyroidism anti-TPO was present in 8.3%. There was no predisposing factor to thyroid antibodies that was significantly different when the two groups were compared. Conclusion- The prevalence of thyroid antibodies was higher in women GDM compared with normoglycemic women but the finding was not statistically significant. Subclinical hypothyroidism was the commonest thyroid hormone disorder in GDM and had the highest prevalence of thyroid antibodies. There were no exposure indices for thyroid antibodies that showed significantly higher odds of predisposing to thyroid antibodies