Circulating RNA Transcriptome of Pregnant Women with TSH Just Above the Trimester-Specific Reference and its Correlation with the Hypertensive Phenotype

Abstract

During gestation, a woman’s body undergoes physiological changes that alter thyroid function. Pregnant women with hypothyroidism may exhibit gestational complications, including hypertension and preeclampsia. We investigated differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in circulating RNAs from pregnant women with TSH levels just above the normal range to determine the impact of a mild elevation of TSH in pregnancy. We selected three women with healthy thyroid pregnancy (HTP), three pregnant women with gestational hypothyroidism (GHT), and three nonpregnant women (NPG) to construct transcriptome libraries. We also compared our results with data from the GEO dataset and DisGeNET. We identified 1500 DEG in GHT and 1656 DEG in HTP. From GEO dataset, we recognized 453 DEGs in trimester-specific plasma RNA, 1263 DEGs in placental tissues from healthy women, 1031 DEGs from preeclamptic uteroplacental tissues and 1657 DEGs from placental tissues from severely preeclamptic women. In this scenario, 12.26% and 12.86% genes were shared between these datasets in GHT and HTP, respectively. We stablished 62 genes in GHT DEGs related to hypertensive phenotype hallmarks. In conclusion, even in women with a mild TSH increment, we were able to detect some DEGs that could be associated with a hypertensive phenotype.