Analysis of Thyroid Hormones in Newborns with Hypoxic Ischaemic Encephalopathy

INTRODUCTION: Thyroid hormone plays an essential role in brain development and fetal, neonatal, and adult brain function and may influence neuronal recovery after hypoxia and traumatic brain injury. We aimed to see whether there is a relationship between the effects of hypoxia at the cellular level and the stages of the disease.
METHODS: After ethics committee approval and informing the families, demographic characteristics, laboratory parameters, diffusion MRI images, and TSH and free T4 levels from thyroid function tests on postnatal days 5 and 21 were recorded retrospectively in newborns who were hospitalized with the diagnosis of hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy in the neonatal intensive care unit of our hospital in the last two years. 81 HIE babies over 37 gestational weeks and 50 control babies of the same age participated in the study. Sarnat staging was performed according to the patient's clinical status.
RESULTS: There were no statistically significant differences between HIE and healthy babies regarding gender, mode of delivery, birth weight, and birth week. According to Sarnat scoring, while healthy infants had lower TSH levels on postnatal day 5 compared to all types of hypoxic infants, moderate HIE newborns had higher TSH measurements compared with healthy, mild, and severe HIE neonates (p=0.001). fT4 level was statistically significantly higher in moderate HIE babies than in healthy, mild, and severe newborns (p=0.001).
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: We demonstrated that thyroid hormones, known to have significant effects on energy catabolism and central nervous system development, varied over time in HIE infants at various stages.