The study, known as the Colorado Thyroid Disease Prevalence Study, set out to determine how common abnormal thyroid function actually is, and to look at the relationship between abnormal thyroid function, cholesterol levels, and thyroid symptoms.
A few keypoints of the study and its implications:
- Among patients not taking thyroid medication 9.9 percent of the population had a thyroid abnormality that had most likely gone unrecognized.
- Even a slight decrease in thyroid may raise cholesterol levels.
- An underactive thyroid -- hypothyroidism -- affects more women than men, and the risk increases with age for both men and women.
- There is a need for more widespread thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) testing and more aggressive treatment, especially for subclinical patients.
Suffering from undiagnosed hypothyroidism points to an urgent need for doctors to become better educated about and more proactive in testing for thyroid disease. Patients also need to become more informed, and insist on thyroid testing when doctors or HMO's are reluctant.
Careful evaluation of patients' symptoms should be an important part in the diagnosis of hypothyroidism, and the existence of several symptoms in tandem should be a signal to test for thyroid problems. The need for more frequent monitoring and adjustment of dosages -- versus the typical doctor's recommendation of maximum yearly testing - - but may in fact suggest that there are serious inadequacies in the current therapies, which primarily almost solely on synthetic thyroid hormone replacement known as levothyroxine.
More detailed information is featured in a detailed online article.
