Pregnancy has no significant impact on thyroid cancer, and treatment for thyroid cancer has no significant impact on pregnancy outcomes, according to research by Shagupta Yasmeen, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UC Davis.

"Thyroid cancer discovered during or after pregnancy does not appear to have a significant impact on the prognosis of the disease, and thyroidectomy (surgery to remove the thyroid) during pregnancy was not associated with adverse maternal or neonatal outcomes," Yasmeen and her coauthors reported in the International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics in October.

The researchers arrived at the good news by scouring the California Cancer Registry for all thyroid cancers occurring during pregnancy between 1991 and 1999, and comparing maternal and perinatal outcomes in these cases with those of an age-matched group of non pregnant women with thyroid cancer.