11 common medical conditions often caused by thyroid disease

5. Anxiety & Panic Disorders

One day you wake up with overflowing physical energy, even feeling severely anxious, with a rapid heartbeat, profuse sweating, trembling hands, and diarrhea, and you can’t stop losing weight. Then soon enough, without warning, your energy plummets. You feel like a slug, are constipated, your hair starts falling out, you gain weight no matter how little you eat, and you are severely depressed. You may have difficulty swallowing, sound hoarse, and feel like you have swallowed something that wont go down. And then, suddenly, your old symptoms return, and you feel anxious, sweaty, trembling, and panicky. This cycle can repeat itself again and again. While your symptoms resemble a mental health issue, they could be signs of Hashimoto’s disease, one cause of hypothyroidism.

Hashimoto’s disease, also known as autoimmune thyroiditis or simply Hashimoto’s, is caused by an autoimmune disorder. In this case, the body’s immune system sees the thyroid gland as a foreign body and begins to attack, damage, and kill thyroid cells along the way. As the cells are damaged or destroyed, they release their stored thyroid hormone, causing classic hyperthyroid symptoms such as anxiety, panic attacks, shaking hands, sweating, and a racing heart. Each autoimmune attack causes more and more damage to the thyroid gland until, ultimately, the gland is no longer able to produce adequate thyroid hormones. Every cell in the body needs thyroid hormones, so a deficiency can wreak havoc on the entire system, causing depression, weight gain, severe fatigue, brain fog, memory loss, and even overall body aches. With such a dramatic swing in symptoms, it’s easy to see how Hashimoto’s disease could be misdiagnosed as a mental illness like manic depression or bipolar disorder. And it happens much too often.
Both hypothyroidism and hyperthyroidism can present with mental health symptoms.

6. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome

Carpal tunnel syndrome, a condition where pressure on the median nerve causes pain, numbness, tingling and weakness in the hand, fingers, wrist, and forearm, is a common complaint. Some thyroid patients, in particular those with hypothyroidism, struggle with carpal tunnel syndrome, but don’t realize that there is a key connection between this painful nerve problem and their thyroid function. Hypothyroid patients often find themselves with CTS because those who have thyroid dysfunction tend to retain excess fluids in their connective tissues. Accumulation of musopolysaccarides, another common occurrence in hypothyroid patients, promotes swelling around the median nerve which increases pressure and compression of the carpal tunnel.

7. Heart Disease

Have you been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, high cholesterol, or high blood pressure? It is possible your thyroid hormone levels could be responsible. Thyroid hormones have a direct effect on the heart, causing it to speed up or slow way down, creating heart disease. Your doctor, after evaluating the heart disease symptoms, may refer you to a cardiac specialist. Cardiologists may only look at the heart disease symptoms at hand, not considering the possibility that thyroid hormone imbalance could be the cause.

Low Thyroid Hormones
With too little thyroid hormones circulating within the body, your heartbeat slows down and can even cause irregular heartbeats to occur, Bradycardia. Low thyroid hormones reduce the function of the heart, sometimes causing fluid to develop around it, causing pericardial effusion.
Low thyroid hormone levels can also cause high cholesterol for many people. Increased levels of “bad” lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol are directly related to sub-optimal thyroid function. These hormones not only make cholesterol (good or bad), but they are also responsible for eliminating the cholesterol that we do not need. When the extra cholesterol isn’t removed, plaque develops within our arteries, clogging them. The result can be heart disease, stroke, or even heart attack. In a Dutch study called “The Rotterdam Study”, it was found that elderly women with subclinical hypothyroidism were almost twice as likely as women without this condition to have blockages in the aorta. They were also twice as likely to have had heart attacks. Having autoimmune hypothyroidism with elevated antibodies to thyroid peroxidase increased the risk even further.
Blood pressure can also become high when thyroid hormones are too low. Arterial stiffness, thickening, and decreased elasticity can occur when too little thyroid hormone is circulating within the body, increasing peripheral vascular resistance, causing blood pressure to rise. Many doctors prescribe statin drugs for high cholesterol levels and blood pressure medication without first checking thyroid hormone levels to see if they could be the the underlying cause.
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