Butt First Babies and Your Thyroid

I don't know how much credence there is to the idea that being hypothyroid during pregnancy can affect the baby's position, but it's important to me for obvious reasons. During some other Internet wanderings I saw it mentioned and so now I'm going to look into it a teeny bit more.

This Perfect Health Diet site has a well-written page about it. Apparently some Dutch study showed a correlation between breech babies and hypothyroidism. Here is their rundown:

• "Pregnant women with a TSH of 0.5 or less had NO breech births at all, and those between 0.51 and 0.71 had only a 1% chance of a breech birth.
• Pregnant women with a TSH between 0.71 and 2.49 had about a 5% chance of breech birth.
• Pregnant women with TSH of 2.50 to 2.89 had an 11% chance of breech birth, while those with TSH above 2.89 had a 14% chance of breech birth."

Here is more information about that Dutch study from Endocrine Today. Given the importance of thyroid health in pregnancy, it's odd to me that a thyroid panel isn't routine for pre-natal appointments! I never had my thyroid levels checked at my OB, and I desperately wish they would have checked. Maybe I could have avoided a c-section.

iVillage has an article about the SAME study, but a good quote from theirs follows: "The link between thyroid dysfunction during pregnancy and difficulties during labor is well established," the lead author of the new study, Victor Pop, a research professor at the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands, said in a news release from the Society for Endocrinology. "However, to our knowledge, this is the first study to show an association between maternal thyroid hormone concentration during late gestation and fetal head position in healthy pregnant women with normal thyroid function." 

 Links to Related Studies:

Low Concentrations of Maternal Thyroxin During Early Gestation: A Risk Factor of Breech Presentation?

Maternal Thyroid Function at During Gestation Is Related to Breech Presentation At Term

Maternal Thyroid Function and the Outcome of External Cephalic Version
*I included this one because when we found out Lainey was still breech we tried this, which is basically the OB manhandling the baby THROUGH your tummy and trying to turn the baby. Apparently if your TSH is high (which I'm guessing mine was), the version is less successful. Interesting.