From 1987 to the late 1990s, James Haddow and his team of researchers at the Foundation for Blood Research in Scarborough, Maine, studied children born to women who had thyroid deficiencies while pregnant with those children. Haddow's team focused the study on newborns who had normal thyroid function at the time of neonatal screening. They tested the intelligence quotient, or IQ, of the children, ages eight to eleven years, and found that all of the children born to thyroid-hormone deficient mothers performed less well than the control group. Haddow and his colleagues published the experiment and results, Maternal Thyroid Deficiency during Pregnancy and Subsequent Neuropsychological Development of the Childin 1999. Haddow and his team proposed that undetected low thyroid hormone production in mothers, or maternal hypothyroidism, could adversely affect the neuropsychological development of children.
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