The 3 Stages of Hashimoto's Disease. How to distinguish the 3 stages of autoimmune thyroid.

welcome back this is dr jin sung where clinical excellence meets excellent results today we're going to talk about hashimoto's thyroiditis and how do we know what stage of autoimmunity that we are in when we have hypothyroid related to hashimoto's thyroiditis now behind me we have three phases oftentimes when patients come in there are they already know that they have hashimoto's thyroiditis they're already in the inflamed state their tsh is off or they've been diagnosed with by their physician okay so when we look at patients we have to look at it in terms of different stages because if we can catch things early on the outcome could be much better so let's look at it we have stage one when someone comes in and they have what they call silent autoimmunity right what that means is that they have antibodies to their thyroid they have their tpo and thyroglobulin antibodies that are positive yet they have no symptoms and they have no loss of thyroid tissue right so the labs come back normal everything's normal except they have an elevation of thyroid antibodies yet it's silent second stage is when they come in they have autoimmune reactivity what that means is they have elevated thyroid antibodies but they have symptoms symptoms of hair loss brittle hair constipation fatigue um cold intolerance etc right they have symptoms but when they check their tsh thyroid stimulating hormone is normal if tsh is normal in the medical model there's nothing to do right yet they are experiencing symptoms and they have elevation of their tpo and thyroglobin antibodies right so that is called autoimmune reactivity now what happens is you have autoimmune disease stage three in that stage you have elevation of tpo and or thyroglobulin antibodies you have symptoms hair loss constipation weight gain etc you have measurable tissue destruction right your thyroid is inflamed it's tender to touch there's destruction happening of the thyroid gland and the elevated tsh right now here we go tsh is normal tsh is normal elevated tsh this is when the conventional medical molecule model will intervene they will say oh the tsh is elevated and you need thyroid hormones right to bring the tsh down by this time tissue destruction is already occurring right so when patients come in oftentimes they're kind of in this stage right but what we like to do with those patients is if they have children or sisters or you know family or relatives that are close to them is to say have them check for tpo antibodies and thyroglobulin antibodies and the reason is they might have silent autoimmunity going on and they've they have not reached this stage yet but if you can catch a patient early on in stage one there are a lot of lifestyle and nutritional management interventions that can be used to help keep the autoimmunity in the silent stage as we start to progress it becomes more difficult so if someone has elevated tsh they might have been diagnosed five ten years ago they are on thyroid hormone thyroid replacement hormone right and the tissue destruction continues to happen because this is an autoimmune disease and they have elevation of tpo and thyroglobulin antibodies so they will never or possibly never get off the thyroid medications right but there's also interventions you can do in this third stage of autoimmunity right so it's very important decipher where we are in the three stages of autoimmunity for hashimoto's thyroiditis and make your interventions early on rather than waiting for the tsh to be elevated to be diagnosed or treated right my name is dr jin sung where clinical excellence meets excellent results and we'll see you guys next week on the healthy side have an awesome day

Channel: Dr. Jin W. Sung

Views: 22,450

Keywords: hashimoto's, thyroiditis, low thyroid, low TSH, TPO, thyroglobulin, thyroid antibodies

Id: ETJtQOffjTc

Length: 5min 16sec (316 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 04 2020