under active thyroid

Hi I have had underactive thyroid for 20 years.I am 50 years old.It is very early days for you.Give it six months and you will start to feel better.However I have found you must look after yourself more than other people lots of good fruit veg chicken and walk everywhere with your baby I have learned quit a bit over the years.Most doctors are very unsimpathetic.I took take 100mcg its a very common dose.Certain things do not agree with Thyroxine.

IT WILL GET BETTER all you feel is really happening its not you imagining it .It is awful.

Take care

Hi I have been taking 150mgs of thyroxine for 5 yrs and i dont realy feel any better. i am always tired, i have little energy, get depressed, so doc gave me anti depressants for that.

i suppose we are all different, i am 54 and some days like today feel 100.

i hope it works for you

maggie

I think going from 25mcg to 100mcg in 6 weeks is to quick. You should have 6 weeks between blood tests.It can be dangerous to increase dosage quickly

Were you told your prescriptons would not have to be paid for?

May I respectfully post a different point of view to Smith?

Some research in the Netherlands compared two approaches - starting people off on a low dose and slowly titrating against starting people on their calculated full replacement dose. (Full replacement is based on body weight and, while different people use different figures, is typically in the range 1.6 to 2.2 mcg per kg per day.)

This research was a bit inconclusive, finding no particular advantage in the full replacement technique, but also finding no particular disadvantage. It certainly did not find any major problem in doing so.

There are quite a number of papers and personal experiences around that claim starting on too low a dose can actually be a really bad thing. Seems as soon as the body starts to get some thyroid hormone, it suffers severely when it is subsequently denied the hormone again. That is precisely what will happen on a very low dose in a body starved of the hormones. (By way of illustration, imagine someone who needs 100 but gets 25. It could be largely gone in 6 hours. So each day they have a few hours of almost OK followed by crashing to the full extent of their hypo level for much of the rest of the day.)

Further, probably the major reason for the 6 to 8 week titration interval is that it apparently can take that long for the TSH level to stabilise. Sorry, but that is to me madness. What should be being measured are the thyroid hormone levels, fT3 and fT4 - and these change and stabilise much more quickly. For a start, hyperplasia of the pituitary can result in excess TSH being produced in hypothyroid sufferers. (That is, more TSH than would appear to be indicated by the thyroid hormone levels.)

Maintaining someone hypothyroid when it is possible to do anything about it should be regarded as malpractice. It allows further damage to occur to the sufferer.

I do not agree. It can send the body into a state of shock after being deficient for a long time, to suddenly drench it in thyroxine. It will cause hyperthyroid symptoms to say the least.

When I was finally diagnosed, after 2 years - my TSH was 52. I was started on 50mcg and 6 weeks later didn't feel much different when I went back for my check up. My GP said he didn't expect me to but I was to increase my dose to 100mcg. That is when I started to see the difference. Once I got up to 150 mcg things were very much better.

I agree that 25mcg may be a bit too little, I didn't even know they did 25mcg doses for a long time, but it really does need to be introduced, and increased, at 6 week intervals, no less.