By Swathi A.N. Rao, MD
Riverview Health Physicians
Are you feeling more tired than usual lately? Has your mood become more bleak or are you more forgetful than normal? Many women attribute symptoms like these to being too busy and having too much to do in a day, but they could be signs of a common health issue: an underactive thyroid.
According to the American Thyroid Association (ATA), an estimated 20 million Americans have some form of thyroid disease. Women are five to eight times more likely than men to have thyroid problems, and one woman out of eight will develop a thyroid disorder during her lifetime.
Despite its relatively small size compared to your body’s other organs, your thyroid has a big responsibility. This gland regulates your body’s metabolism—the rate at which your body produces energy from nutrients and oxygen—and affects critical body functions such as your energy level and heart rate.
Your thyroid is also a site for one of the more common chronic medical conditions in the United States—hypothyroidism. Usually caused when your immune system response backfires or does more harm than good, hypothyroidism results in an underactive thyroid that is unable to make enough hormones to keep a person’s body running correctly. Symptoms of hypothyroidism include:
- Depression, irritability or nervousness
- Constipation
- Increased sensitivity to cold
- Muscle weakness
- Pale, dry skin
- Unexplained weight loss or weight gain
- Forgetfulness or fuzzy thinking
- Feeling fatigued and sluggish
- Menstrual irregularities
While people with thyroid problems may experience such symptoms, they may not always know that this gland is to blame. That’s why it’s so important to talk to your primary care provider who will order blood tests that measure thyroid hormone and thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) levels to determine if you have hypothyroidism.
While anyone can develop hypothyroidism, it’s important to catch this potentially dangerous condition early on and treat it properly.
Sources: FamilyDoctor.org, Hormone.org, NLM.NIH.org, Thyroid.org