What is completely perplexing to me is that even with the availability of blood testing, millions of people aren't even able to get diagnosed. The Colorado Thyroid Prevalence Study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in early 2000, estimated that nationally, more than 13 million Americans have undiagnosed thyroid disease.
And that number is conservative, given more recent developments. The doctors who rely on blood tests currently don't agree with each other as to what constitutes "normal" test results. For several years, a controversy has been raging among conventional endocrinologists regarding the recommendation to narrow the so-called "normal" range of the TSH test to 0.3 to 3.0, from the current range of approximately 0.5 to 5.0. Such a change to lab values was recommended back in late 2002/early 2003 by both the AACE and the National Academy of Clinical Biochemistry.
One 2005 study reported on in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that using a TSH upper normal range of 5.0, approximately 5% of the population is hypothyroid. However, if the upper portion of the normal range was lowered to 3.0, approximately 20% of the population -- as many as 59 million people -- would be hypothyroid. (Fatourechi V, Klee GG, Grebe SK, et al. Effects of reducing the upper limit of normal TSH values. Journal of the American Medical Association. 2003;290:3195-3196.)
If a simple change to the lab value norms could result in an additional 40+ million people being diagnosed as having thyroid disease, then it's hard to question the argument that current blood tests are not successfully diagnosing everyone with hypothyroidism.
As for Armour, the AACE's condemnation of this drug includes a major medical error. No currently marketed prescription desiccated thyroid drug is made of "ground up cattle thyroid glands," as the AACE stated in their letter. Use of cattle in preparation of prescription thyroid drugs was phased out years ago. Armour Thyroid, and other brands of desiccated thyroid, drugs that are legally sold as prescription pharmaceuticals and regulated by the FDA, are made only of the thyroid glands of pigs. That the endocrinology community does not even know what desiccated thyroid is currently made of raises serious questions about their level of knowledge in their own field, and their motives in disseminating obviously erroneous information to the media.
The argument against Armour also does not have a scientific basis. The preference for synthetic, versus natural, thyroid is opinion. There is no double-blind, peer-reviewed medical research that establishes that today's levothyroxine is superior in treating hypothyroidism as compared to today's prescription desiccated thyroid drugs. The way that thyroid hormone replacement drugs are evaluated and measured for effectiveness is in their ability to restore and maintain a patient to normal thyroid status (euthyroid status), as measured by the thyroid blood tests. A thyroid patient taking an appropriate dosage of Armour Thyroid is, when monitored and properly titrated by their physicians, able to maintain euthyroid levels. If that wasn't so, thousands of responsible physicians across the U.S. would not prescribe it for their thyroid patients. And, in 2004, more than 2 million prescriptions were written for Armour Thyroid. There are clearly many doctors who are able to properly adjust the dose to fit their patients' needs.
All in all, it appears that the AACE, likely at the insistence of Synthroid, is yet again coming to the aid of its main sponsor. Threatened by Dr. Hotze's appearance on national network morning show, and his clear disdain for the conventional endocrinology approach as espoused by AACE, and his criticisms against the drug Synthroid, AACE felt it necessary to defend the conventional medical viewpoint, and, by attacking Armour, to implicitly defend Synthroid.
