Thyroid hormone in utero and vision

Written byKerry Grens

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This morning, at the annual meeting of the linkurl:American Thyroid Association,;http://www.thyroid.org/ann_mtg/2007_78th/index.html I was captivated by a talk that included a very resourceful experimental design. linkurl:Joanne Rovet's;http://www.sickkids.on.ca/RovetLab/default.asp group, at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, described her research on the effects of hypothyroidism in pregnant women on the visual processing of their babies. Rovet's group found that babies exposed to low thyroid hormone in utero ended up with reduced contrast sensitivity, while visual acuity remained unaffected. This means that as visual processing splits in the brain into the magno and parvo pathways, just the magno pathway, in which contrast is processed, gets affected by low thyroid levels. The findings are interesting, and I'd like to know just what thyroid hormone targets in the magno pathway contribute to the reduced ability to resolve contrast in these babies. But what was particularly interesting about Rovet's study was how she designed it - or didn't. linkurl:John Lazarus;http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/medicine/endocrinology/staffpages/johnlazarus.htm of Cardiff University asked whether the mothers with hypothyroidism were treated with thyroxine, the prohormone to the active thyroid hormone. Apparently, they all were, but with poor monitoring and adherence, as Rovet put it, that's just what exists in the real world. And for better or worse, the real world gave her a pretty neat experiment. The other talks this morning included some interesting work by linkurl:Antonio Bianco;http://biancolab.bwh.harvard.edu/ at Harvard University on the systemic role of bile acids in metabolism, and an historical review of the discovery of thyroid hormone resistance by the man who found it 40 years ago, linkurl:Samuel Refetoff;http://www.uchospitals.edu/physicians/samuel-refetoff.html at the University of Chicago.

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Meet the Author

Kerry Grens
Kerry served as The Scientist’s news director until 2021. Before joining The Scientist in 2013, she was a stringer for Reuters Health, the senior health and science reporter at WHYY in Philadelphia, and the health and science reporter at New Hampshire Public Radio. Kerry got her start in journalism as a AAAS Mass Media fellow at KUNC in Colorado. She has a master’s in biological sciences from Stanford University and a biology degree from Loyola University Chicago.
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