Complaints & connections · borters.ch
The thyroid gives too little gas — the whole body runs in saving mode, which can usually be balanced well with hormones.
Also known as: hypothyroidism · Hashimoto’s
Open in the tool — with search and all the links →This compilation is for information and replaces neither medical diagnosis nor treatment. If you have symptoms, see a doctor.
In an underactive thyroid the gland delivers too little hormone and the metabolism drops a gear: tiredness, feeling cold, dry skin, constipation, a slow pulse, a gain of a few kilos, low mood, and in women heavier or irregular periods. Because all of this can have other causes, the laboratory decides. The first value is TSH: it is the pituitary’s call and rises when too little arrives — so it moves opposite to the thyroid. If it is raised, free T4 follows. Together they separate overt underactivity (TSH high, fT4 low) from the subclinical form (TSH high, fT4 normal), which is often only watched. The commonest cause in our part of the world is Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, an autoimmune disease, recognised by TPO antibodies. Treatment is levothyroxine, the hormone itself, in the morning on an empty stomach and well apart from calcium, iron and coffee, which slow its uptake. Checking follows at the earliest after six to eight weeks — before that the value says little. Worth knowing: during another severe illness the values can be temporarily shifted without the thyroid being ill.
Over- or underactivity should be diagnosed and treated (e.g. hormone replacement) — the key step.
Feeling cold does not prove the thyroid. The most common other reasons are an empty iron store and a vitamin B12 deficiency — both produce the same cold and the same tiredness. With autoimmune thyroiditis they come along more often, because the same immune situation can affect the stomach lining, and then less iron and B12 is taken up. Ferritin and B12 show whether something is missing there.
Iodine is the building block of thyroid hormones; both deficiency and excess can harm. Iodised salt and sea fish cover the need.
In the morning half an hour before breakfast, with water. Calcium, iron, magnesium and coffee at least four hours apart — they bind the hormone in the gut.
Before that TSH says little, because it lags. Then adjust in small steps — too much hormone causes palpitations and harms bone.
In pregnancy the need rises by about a third and the targets are tighter. Anyone on treatment therefore reports a pregnancy early.
Levothyroxine is the hormone itself, not a drug against something. What is missing is replaced — the dose follows the TSH, and it takes six to eight weeks for a new level to settle.
About two to five in a hundred people are affected, women markedly more often, and it becomes more common with age. The underactivity develops over years; after a dose change it takes six to eight weeks before the value means anything again.
Sensitivity to cold is among the more reliable signs, because it stands out from those around you. Cold hands and feet fit with it.
The skin turns rough and scaly, the hair thin and dull. A special case is loss of the outer part of the eyebrows.
Constipation and a resting pulse under sixty without an athletic reason fit the picture. Both improve again with treatment.
An underactive thyroid accounts for two to four kilos, mostly water. Explaining a marked weight gain by it alone misleads — and treatment does not take it away either.
Muscle and joint stiffness in the morning, a tendency to frozen shoulder and carpal tunnel syndrome. This is rarely connected with the thyroid.
An underactive thyroid lengthens and strengthens bleeding more often than it stops it — both occur and both are treatable.
Clearly effective with proven deficiency, useless without. Take only with a documented deficiency — excess is harmful.
Compare iodine and selenium content.
Studied in autoimmune thyroiditis; supplemented only with a proven deficiency, because too much harms.
Too little and too much both cause problems — so nothing is supplemented on suspicion here.
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