#408 ‒ AMA #89: Thyroid health: interpreting symptoms, diagnosing and treating dysfunction, and navigating the gray zone

Hey everyone, welcome to a sneak peek, ask me anything or AMA episode of the drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. At the end of this short episode, I'll explain how you can access the AMA episodes in full, along with a ton of other membership benefits we've created, or you can learn more now by going to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. So without further delay, here's today's sneak peek of the ask me anything episode. Welcome to ask me anything AMA episode 89. In today's AMA, we look at managing the thyroid and unusually complex hormonal system that is, I guess, if anything, more nuanced and in some ways controversial than the management of other hormones. In this episode, we discuss the basic biology of the thyroid gland and how it's regulated by the brain and specifically the pituitary gland and hypothalamus. And then we talk about how thyroid activity is regulated locally at the tissues where it's used. Talk about why hypothyroidism is common, but easily misdiagnosed by symptoms alone. Talk about how hypothyroid is both underdiagnosed and overdiagnosed, and why some patients on standard thyroid hormone systems still don't feel well. We talk about the appropriate use of combination therapy. So that's T3 and T4, as opposed to just the standard treatments of T4. We talk about the theoretical thyroid supporting supplements. Is there any signal in all the noise of that stuff? And then we close with, I guess, what we would consider our framework in the clinic. So who actually needs testing, what a reasonable lab panel might look like, and then how to think about a patient whose labs are normal. But who still doesn't feel right and whom you might suspect is actually deficient in their thyroid hormone. So if you're a subscriber and want to watch the full video of this podcast, you can find it on the show notes page. And if you're not a subscriber, you can watch a sneak peek of this video on our YouTube page. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy AMA number 89. Peter, welcome to another AMA. How are you doing? Very good, thanks. Well, today we're going to talk about the thyroid. So this is something that it seems like people hear about all the time, but really don't understand well. And so I think what might be helpful for people before we get into it is maybe just explaining why this is such a complex, complicated topic. Yeah, I mean, I think there's probably several ways to think about that. But certainly one reason is that the regulation of thyroid hormones is quite complicated. And that's true for several reasons, but I'll state one at the outset, which is it's a hormone system for thyroid cancer. And it's a hormone system for thyroid cancer. And it's a hormone system for which the Goldilocks principle applies, right? Too much is a problem, and too little is a problem. Now, conversely, if you think about testosterone, you know, male androgens, that's not the case, right? There's really no naturally occurring scenario where you have too much of it. And by the way, even when people are having testosterone replaced, if you give them too much, they generally just feel better. So it's not, you know, it's actually a more asymmetric problem. But the thyroid is particularly nuanced. And there's a feedback sequence. And there's a feedback sequence in the brain that works a lot like other hormones we know about, including testosterone. But again, a second thing that then makes this really complicated is that you have an inactive hormone that is the thing that's actually getting secreted by the thyroid gland. That gets converted to an active hormone locally. And by the way, there are different ways that it gets converted. So there are different enzymes that convert it. And so I think that's, obviously, what all of these things. I guess the other thing I would say is how you interpret the lab test is a little bit problematic. Again, when you are looking at something like estrogen, progesterone, or testosterone, provided you're using the right assay, like an LCMS test, you can very accurately measure those hormones. As we'll discuss in the thyroid, that's not always the case. I would say another thing that makes this complicated is the importance of how symptoms fit into the diagnosis. Now, again, that should be part and parcel with every endocrine diagnosis. It's just that the symptoms of low estrogen and progesterone and testosterone are much more apparent and have fewer overlaps with other potential diagnoses than we see with thyroid. So I think when you take all of these things together, managing the thyroid hormone is sort of a ripe environment for ideologic battles and pseudoscience and sort of a little bit of chicanery when it comes to sometimes practitioners doing more harm than good when they're trying to treat patients. Given that, it seems like the best place to probably start is just explaining to people what is the thyroid and what does it actually do. So it's a small gland with two lobes on either side of your throat, really sitting on top of your voice box, just below the Adam's apple is really where it starts. And then it rises to the side and then goes down the other side. So it makes a hormone, but primarily the one that it makes is called T4 and it's called T4 because it has four iodines on it. The downstream of that effect is that this hormone regulates the metabolic rate of basically every cell in the body. So you can think of the thyroid gland as the gain knob on your body's metabolic amplifier. So it's not really deciding what your cells do so much as how loudly they do it. So if you have two little signal and everything is basically going to run cold and slow, your heart rate's going to drop, your weight's going to probably creep up. You feel like you're operating at half capacity, you're low in energy, et cetera. Too much of it, of course. And again, it's not a big line between too much and too little and everything goes up. Everything's hot and fast. So your heart rate goes up. You might even have unexpected weight loss, anxiety, insomnia, atrial fibrillation, all sorts of things like that. I'd say kind of roughly like 5% of adults in the United States have some clinically meaningful thyroid dysfunction. So for that reason, I mean, it's wildly prevalent. And that means by definition, many people listening to us right now are experiencing that. But as I've kind of alluded to, I think it's one of the more commonly mismanaged conditions I see. I mean, that's obviously why I want to spend a lot of time on it. We do see a lot of patients come into our practice who are being mismanaged in this regard. And I think by example, many other doctors are probably seeing that too. Yeah. And so with that mismanagement, it's almost like there's a lot of disagreement around this, right? It's not a super clean topic, not a super clean biology in a way. And so why do you think that this can be such a contentious topic for doctors and people to understand? I think because the system is complex, which is not unique to the body. But when you combine that with the fact that we don't have parts, I think that creates a bit of a perfect storm. So as I kind of alluded to, the gland mostly secretes an inactive pro-hormone, T4. And then there's a decision about how much of that hormone becomes the active hormone, T3. But that decision is happening locally, tissue by tissue. Now, TSH, thyroid stimulating hormone, is a great marker of whether the gland is being told to work harder, but it's a step removed from what's actually happening. Inside the liver, the heart, the brain. Then there's also kind of a real philosophical split. So there's a camp of physicians, I suppose, that think hypothyroidism is underdiagnosed, undertreated. And then that's kind of the, when you're a hammer, everything is a nail camp, right? Like any problem that anybody shows up with, if you're depressed, if you're having GI issues, if you're having sleep, whatever the problem is, it's hypothyroidism. At the other end, you have, you know, other folks who say, no, no, no, this is completely overdiagnosed by this kind of everybody has hypothyroidism school of thought. And basically, we're only going to treat hypothyroidism if it is so overt that a medical school student, after one hour of an endocrinology class, would be able to make this diagnosis blindfolded. As you can probably imagine, I think both of these schools are incorrect, and that there's a mess middle ground where the truth probably lies. And the goal of this podcast, of course, is then to kind of walk people through the physiology carefully enough that you can see both the grains of truth on each side of those schools of thought, but perhaps more importantly, what they might be missing and therefore where we can hopefully land on a place to treat people. Yeah. And so on that, it seems like for a lot of people, the first time they start thinking about the thyroid is they're either tired, gaining weight, something just quote unquote doesn't feel right. You do what anyone does, and they go to Google, they search it, and there's a ton of people, a ton of things saying, hey, there's something wrong with the thyroid, their hypothyroid. And so how much can you actually tell from some of those generic symptoms like that? Yeah. Unfortunately, almost nothing about fatigue and feeling off is specific to any one organ system or cause. And we see this in formal minded studies trying to diagnose hypothyroidism purely off of symptom clusters without any biochemistry. So they essentially couldn't distinguish hypothyroid from euthyroid, meaning patients have normal levels of thyroid. The same complaints show up with sleep deprivation, iron deficiency anemia, perimenopause, and menopause-related symptoms. And the last one, by the way, may be one of the single biggest confounders in my practice, especially since the timing often overlaps, but that's maybe a later issue. But what's going on inside the endocrine system and how to fix it are actually kind of different. So you do need the rigor of multiple data sources. And I think that a lab-first approach, rather than a symptom-first approach, is more likely to get you in the high zone of probability, again, based on how nonspecific these symptoms are. So I think it's a good place to then kind of look at it clinically in your practice, right? So where are you seeing doctors, particularly in the field of endocrine, who are more likely to get you in the high zone of potentially missing a real thyroid problem? And where do you see people on the other end going too far in that other direction? Well, look, I think a lot of medical care misses real disease when it treats a lab value in isolation from the patient. So dismissing somebody with a patchy gland, positive antibodies, and a family history because their TSH is, you know, quote-unquote normal at 4.2. So that's a legit failure. But just as often, I'm seeing the overreach of the TSH in the other direction. And this is most visibly in this strand of what people call functional medicine that treats subclinical hypothyroidism as close to basically ubiquitous finding. So if you go looking, you'll find practitioners who insist that the standard TSH ranges are too permissive and treat a borderline free T3 or elevated reverse T3 as irrefutable proof of tissue-level hypothyroidism, regardless of TSH or regardless of free T4. And sometimes regardless of symptoms. So having decided that a patient has a thyroid problem, they will build an elaborate root cause narrative, gut health, adrenal fatigue, toxic burden, et cetera, around kind of a lab picture that in a large share of cases is actually within a normal variation or will normalize on its own. So rather than just kind of accepting that a person doesn't have hypothyroidism when their blood work comes back normal by conventional standards, they will maybe use this kind of functional medicine framework to basically assume that there's a problem at the level of the conversion of T4 to T3 in the tissue. Ask the question, what's driving the conversion impairment? I think in reality, a large share of patients with mildly elevated TSH will normalize spontaneously on repeat testing. And I think overtreatment with standard thyroid hormone is not benign. It can actually cause cognitive symptoms, atrial fibrillation, which we've seen countless times, bone loss, and more. So I think both failure modes are real. And some patients go from their family doctor and get hit at one end of it and then are driven into the clinic of a quack who hits them with the other end. And again, just to reiterate, I think both extremes are likely doing more harm than good. Thank you for listening to today's sneak peek AMA episode of The Drive. If you're interested in hearing the complete version of this AMA, you'll want to become a premium member. It's extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads. To do this, our work is made entirely possible by our members. And in return, we offer exclusive member-only content and benefits above and beyond what is available for free. So if you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription. Premium membership includes several benefits. First, comprehensive podcast show notes that detail every topic, paper, person, and thing that we discuss in each episode. And the word on the street is nobody's show notes rival ours. Second, monthly ask me anything or AMA episodes. These episodes are comprised of detailed responses to subscriber questions, typically focused on a single topic and are designed to offer a great deal of clarity and detail on topics of special interest to our members. You'll also get access to the show notes for these episodes, of course. Third, delivery of our premium newsletter, which is put together by our dedicated team of research analysts. This newsletter covers a wide range of topics related to longevity and provides much more detail than our free weekly newsletter. Fourth, access to our private podcast feed that provides you with access to every episode, including AMA's sans the spiel you're listening to now and in your regular podcast feed. Fifth, the qualities, an additional member-only podcast we put together that serves as a highlight reel featuring the best excerpts from previous episodes of The Drive. This is a great way to catch up on previous episodes without having to go back and listen to each one of them. And finally, other benefits that are added along the way. If you want to learn more and access these member-only benefits, you can head over to peteratiamd.com forward slash subscribe. You can also find me on YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, all with the handle peteratiamd. You can also leave us a review. on Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast player you use. This podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing, or other professional healthcare services, including the giving of medical advice. No doctor-patient relationship is formed. The use of this information and the materials linked to this podcast is at the user's own risk. The content on this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not be involved in this podcast. This podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing, or other professional healthcare services. You can head over to peteratiamd.com forward slash subscribe. You can also find me on Twitter at peteratiamd.com forward slash about where I keep an up-to-date and active list of all disclosures.