Once dx'd, will your thyroid still "die out" or will meds build it up again?
Once you have been diagnosed with "hypo" or "hyper" and you're given medication(s) to help with all your symptoms and thyroid ... is the med(s) helping boost up your thyroid gland again to the optimal level or is it going to die out anyway ... and if it does die out, does it stay that way inside your neck or is it then removed? Thanks all
Re: Once dx'd, will your thyroid still "die out" or will meds build it up again?
It depends ….
It is specifically TPO Antibodies that cause the thyroid gland destruction I think you speak of. These antibodies are associated with hypo, not hyper.
You don’t typically go hyper from that process, except sometimes for brief periods of time as the gland is killed off. As the gland gets more and more destroyed, it has less and less capacity to keep up the level of thyroid hormone your body needs. We then take supplemental thyroid hormone medication to make up the difference. But the meds cannot do anything to repair a destroyed gland. I’m not aware of any way the gland can heal itself back into sufficient hormone producing capacity again.
Then only thing even remotely contradicting this would be that if you do have TPO Antibodies, in theory, you can slow down the destruction. If you take enough thyroid hormone medication to suppress your TSH enough, that lack of TSH will be equate to a lack of stimulation to the thyroid gland. This, in theory, lowers TPO Antibody count, and thus slows down the antibody destruction to the thyroid gland. However, I’m not sure this is a favorable scenario, for other reasons.
But this is not to say that if you are hypothyroid, that you have a dieing thyroid gland. There are other possible causes of hypothyroidism. Secondary hypothyroidism is a condition where the thyroid gland may be health, but something else, like the pituitary gland is responsible for the problem. However that condition is quite rare, compared to primary hypothyroidism. Primary hypothyroidism is where the thyroid gland is directly responsible for the problem. There are cases where this is not a dieing gland, but some other issue, usually nutritional. However that is also quite rare in developed countries.
Once your thyroid gland is killed off by the TPO Antibodies, it is usually simply left there, and not removed.
Now, on the hyper side – a different type of antibodies, that cause Grave’s disease (hyper) – often the thyroid gland is either ablated or surgically removed.
Does that answer your questions?
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My opinions only, not medical advice. Always follow advice of your Doctor, not what I say here.
Re: Once dx'd, will your thyroid still "die out" or will meds build it up again?
Yes Divermon, it does ... thank you so much for taking the time to explain it all, there's so much involved with the thyroid that I get "lost and confused" sometimes ... whereas to all my other conditions/diseases, I've been able to understand those more easily. Thanks again, I appreciate it
Re: Once dx'd, will your thyroid still "die out" or will meds build it up again?
There are some people that belive that you can make a great effect on your thyroid by what you eat. Lifestyle ect. I think that there is some truth in that. But it depends how bad it is damaged. I've heard stories of half of it growing back after it is removed. And people had stories i found on the internet for free there not selling anything, telling how and what they did to recover. I think how much meds your on is a good thing to think about, such as if the MCG amount. If it's less than half your weight in lbs then you might have a chance, I'm on 200mcg so mine is pretty much completly destroyed. I am only talking about hypo though, seems hyper needs to be delt with fast with docs, I've seen to many cases where they found out they were hyper and then ASAP they had it zaped or removed, because of the heart problems and then shortly after they found out it was to late, and they had heart problems or an attack.
