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Is
Your Thyroid Normal or is it Time to
Get Checked?
By
Patricia Pearson
(Best
Health / September, 2009) -- The
incidence of thyroid disease seems
to be rising dramatically. But we
often dismiss the symptoms as simply
the effects of a busy life. Is your
thyroid normal or is it time to see
your doctor?
Most
women have no idea why they’re
beginning to gain weight, to feel
blue, to crave naps at the strangest
times. They don’t understand why
their periods are getting markedly
lighter or suddenly heavier. They
figure female thinning hair or
coarsening is due to diet or age. They
certainly aren’t aware that they’re
experiencing symptoms of thyroid
disease, which is now thought to be
affecting as much as 10 percent of
the North American population, with
women at least four times as likely
to suffer as men.
Symptoms of Hypothyroidism
It was
the autumn of 2007, in my case, when
the butterfly-shaped gland at the
base of my neck began to fail. I
assumed that my deepening sense of
depression was related to grief for
having put down our beloved old dog
at Thanksgiving. It made sense, as
did my chronic yawning, which seemed
typical for my experience of the
winter sleepies.
The
aches and pains I felt were likely
muscle strain due to exercise, I
decided. My skin felt dry because of
the season. The disconcerting
puffiness of my face surely had to
be the result of my recent (typical
40-something?) weight gain.
It
wasn’t until my appetite fell off so
sharply that I could barely manage a
cup of soup without choking that I
began to wonder if something more
serious was going on. Despite
scarcely eating, I was nevertheless
still gaining weight, and I was also
losing my ability to concentrate. I
felt as if, for no apparent reason,
I’d developed ADD. Alarm bells
finally rang and in January, I made
a doctor’s appointment.
The Diagnosis
My
family doctor, as luck would have
it, is religious about checking
thyroid hormone levels in her
patients. She knows that this
unassuming little gland beneath our
Adam’s apple governs the metabolic
speed at which our body hums along,
and is prone to malfunction. In some
cases, the thyroid begins to vastly
overproduce the hormone thyroxine,
creating a condition known as
hyperthyroidism. In other cases,
like mine, it begins to sputter and
conk out.
“You
have hypothyroidism,” my doctor told
me, after getting my blood test
results and calling me in to see
her. “Your thyroid can no longer
produce thyroxine, and you’ll need
to take a synthetic replacement
hormone daily for the rest of your
life.”
Oh! I
sat back heavily in my chair in her
office. I had never heard of thyroid
disease. (I would later learn that
my aunt, sister and grandmother all
had thyroid trouble; family history
is a factor.) It shocked me to think
that what I was going through wasn’t
temporary, but an actual chronic
illness along the lines of diabetes.
Thyroid Disease May Be On The Rise
Nobody
is really sure whether thyroid
disease is actually becoming more
prevalent, but one thing is sure:
The number of prescriptions in
Canada for a common synthetic
thyroid hormone replacement called
Synthroid increased by 28 percent
between 2005 and 2008. And if indeed
“the incidence of thyroid disease is
dramatically rising” in North
America—as M. Sara Rosenthal, author
of The Thyroid Sourcebook and
director of the bioethics program at
the University of Kentucky,
argues—then for researchers the race
is on to determine why this small
gland in our neck is becoming so
vulnerable. Could it simply be that
more women are being screened now?
One American study, testing people
who were visiting a health fair in
Colorado, suggests as much: “Thyroid
dysfunction is common,” the
researchers concluded, and “it may
often go undetected.”
Living with Thyroid Disease
Leaving
my doctor’s office that day, I
remember thinking, Wow, I have
thyroid disease—I have a disease! I
began to take Synthroid, an
inexpensive prescription that built
my thyroxine levels back up so that
in a matter of weeks I was feeling
brighter, brisker and less weirdly
arthritic. The puffiness ebbed, and
I could concentrate again.
Novel as
it was to suddenly be saddled with a
chronic disease, I mentioned it to
everyone I met and was startled at
the number of other women who nodded
in recognition. They, too, were
taking Synthroid or, because they’d
gone in the opposite direction —into
thyroid overdrive—were taking
another medication. One of them was
my cousin’s partner, Michelle
Kellner (who also happens to be a
staffer at Best Health, heading up
the advertising department). She was
less fortunate in her initial
encounter with doctors than I’d
been. When she turned 30, she knew
she was too young to be going
through perimenopause, and yet her
period had stopped for a year.
Uncertain why, she consulted a
number of specialists. “No one knew
what was wrong with me.” No one,
Kellner says, checked her thyroid
hormone levels until she met a
gynecologist who confirmed via a
blood test that she was
hyperthyroid.
He
referred her to an endocrinologist,
who noticed five little nodules on
her neck (a symptom of
hyperthyroidism that can indicate
cancer). A biopsy found nothing
cancerous, and he decided to simply
“monitor” the condition, without
appearing to realize that her
original condition wasn’t being
medicated.
For
several years, she carried on with
her life, unaware that her crushing
exhaustion, an increasingly brittle
irritability and yo-yo-ing weight
were related to this untreated
hyperthyroidism. “I assumed it was
stress,” she says. “I thought it was
a classic work-life balance problem
and that I was pushing myself too
hard.” But, she adds, “I didn’t feel
like myself. I didn’t like myself. I
thought: Something’s not right.”
Kellner
switched doctors, and her new
endocrinologist said: “‘This is
crazy!’ Right away, she put me on
medication.”
By that
point, at the age of 36, Kellner had
developed Graves’ disease, often the
cause of hyperthyroidism. It can
include a particularly devastating
outcome known as thyroid eye
disease, or TED, which features
watery, bulging eyes and double
vision.
She
managed to escape that fate, but she
was now at a point where the most
efficient treatment was to
surgically remove her thryoid,
thereby letting her go into
hypothyroidism. The operation took
two hours, and required a three-day
hospital stay. (A post-operative
biopsy revealed a surprise:
early-stage cancer. Kellner was told
that this was coincidental.) Kellner
is now on replacement thyroid
hormone and, for the first time in
years, feels “amazing.”
Reasons To Get Your Thyroid Checked
Regularly
So, how
common is it to move through life
with subtle symptoms like mine and
Kellner’s with no diagnosis or
appropriate treatment? “Women may
suffer from a range of
misdiagnoses,” notes Rosenthal, who
has authored several peer-reviewed
publications and consumer health
books (and is herself a thyroid
cancer survivor). She says symptoms
of thyroid disease may mask or be
mistaken for other problems, such as
stress, anxiety, panic disorder,
depression, fatigue and weight
problems. Without treatment, the
thyroid will eventually burn out
completely.
Rosenthal recommends that all women
have their thyroid function checked
annually as a matter of course. And
if you’ve been feeling out of sorts
lately, don’t wait for your annual
checkup to have your thyroid tested.
While there are many remedies out
there that promise a quick,
pain-free cure for health and diet
trouble, with thyroid medication the
claim happens to be true. It’s often
the diagnosis, rather than the
treatment, that turns out to be
painful.
Source:
Best Health Magazine, September 2009
issue |
