Free Tribe Members can watch the full webinar replay here. Joe: We’re talking about hypothyroidism and Hashimotos. But can you kind of explain the difference and many people with hypothyroidism sort of fall into that Hashimotos category? Izabella: Absolutely. So hypothyroidism is basically a clinical state where you don’t have enough thyroid hormone on board inside of your body, and that can be caused by a variety of reasons. So that can be caused if you were born without a thyroid gland, if your thyroid gland was surgically removed, if it was destroyed by radiation, if you had a nutrient deficiency that prevented you from having enough of the active components to create thyroid hormone like an iodine deficiency, or it could be caused by an autoimmune destruction of the thyroid gland, which is known as Hashimotos. And looking at the statistics and the rates of thyroid disease in the UK, in most of Eastern and Western Europe as well as the United States and Australia, about 90 to 97 percent of the time, hypothyroidism is gonna be caused by Hashimotos, which is an autoimmune attack on the thyroid gland. Basically what’s happening is the immune system begins to recognize the thyroid gland as a foreign invader or enemy of a sort and starts to launch an attack against it. Eventually this leads to the thyroid gland not being able to produce enough thyroid hormone, thus leading to hypothyroidism. But a person can actually have Hashimotos for 5, 10, 15, sometimes 20 years, and still have “normal thyroid function.” But they still might have a lot of different weird symptoms and some of them thyroid, sometimes some of them kind of more autoimmune symptoms, like anxiety, gut issues, inflammation in their bodies. So I guess the key takeaway of this is if you’re told that you have hypothyroidism, there’s probably a 90 to 97 percent chance that unless it was from surgery than you probably have Hashimotos. And not a lot of people are aware of that and not a lot of doctors are testing for it. Michael: To figure this out – Am I hypothyroid, am I Hashimotos, what’s going on… What’s a full thyroid panel in your world? Izabella: So in my world I would definitely do the TSH test. This is the thyroid stimulating hormone test. And usually if you go to ask to get your thyroid checked that test will almost always be done. And it’s a good test, it can tell you if somebody is very severely hypothyroid. At that point that TSH number will be elevated. You want to look at the range yourself and you want to keep a copy of your own test results because different labs may not use accurate ranges. Back in the day when scientists first determined the reference range for TSH, they had people with thyroid disease in the pool of blood which was deemed to be healthy. So the reference range was really lax, and they were saying that the people with TSH as high as 8 were normal. But we should really be closer to no higher than I would say a 2.5 for most people with normal thyroid function. So you want to look at that number first and foremost to determine whether or not you have hypothyroidism. The other labs to look at for Hashimotos, the two most important labs in my opinion are gonna be thyroid peroxidase antibodies, no antibodies, or thyroglobulin antibodies, which are Tg antibodies. And then 90 percent of people with Hashimotos will have the TPO antibodies and then 80 percent of people will have the Tg antibodies. And this is kind of the traditional thought that of everything that I’ve read until 6 months ago, that was the case – that most people with Hashimotos will have these antibodies, and the antibodies are a really great step. But, now new research has come out that said that looking at cytology, which is a more invasive procedure, but more accurate where they actually take cells out of the thyroid gland and then they look at them under a microscope, they found that more people had Hashimotos than previously thought. So basically what they found is that with using this advanced diagnostic procedure of cytology, they were able to see that only about 50 percent of people who had cytology positive Hashimotos actually had thyroid antibodies, the TPO and TGN antibodies. So potentially there’s a lot of people out there that don’t have the thyroid antibodies. So the other tests you can do for that is gonna be a thyroid ultrasound to look for changes consistent with Hashimotos, which basically the thyroid would have a different kind of appearance. But definitely to start off I would say that TSH, TPO and TGN antibodies. And then looking at your levels of Free T3 and Free T4 which are the active hormones. And then if you’re still negative on that then you can see if you can do a thyroid ultrasound which is just always a good idea for everybody to at least get once. ]]>
