Note: The following is the output of a transcription from the video above. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
Over topics today relative to Hashimoto’s because there’s so much confusing stuff out there. I’ve been in the Hashimoto’s business since literally you’ve even heard of Hashimoto’s, probably before. When we started out, when Hashimoto’s, people would come in and they would come in here with fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, these types of things, and then eventually would evaluate their thyroid and tell them that they had Hashimoto’s as part of their clinical picture. They’d go, “No, my doctor told me that my lab tests were normal.” Most of you have probably heard this by now. Why do I stop thyroid symptoms when my lab tests are normal? And the biggest reason back then was there was two fold. One, nobody ran antibodies to find out that the person that had Hashimoto’s and then once they ran them, there’s mass confusion on what the range is for these antibodies should be. There still semi mass confusion on it.
And so here’s the recent data. So when we first started years ago, we already talked about, I think we already talked about the fact that to figure out whether you have Hashimoto’s, you’ve run these thyroid antibodies and the one that we’re going to talk about specifically, because it’s the one that comes up positive most of the time is the thyroid peroxidase antibodies, TPO antibodies. And when we first started running those antibodies years ago, the range was zero to a hundred. So if you had, you had to have antibodies more than a hundred. It’d have to be like 130, 105 something like that for a doctor to say you have Hashimoto’s. The problem was that a lot of people between the range of nine and 100 had Hashimoto’s symptoms. All of them, 20 out of 20 symptoms they’d have. And then they’d test at 75 and they’d be told they’re normal.
But we worked on this for a long time towards this goal and the vast majority of doctors were realizing that people who had these 20 symptoms or most of the symptoms 10, 15, 16, 20 symptoms, they were in the ranges of 10 to say 100 and being told that they didn’t have any Hashimoto’s. Over a period of time, so the original functional medicine groups use the range of zero to nine. We still use that range. And now what’s happening now is that different labs are coming around to those ranges. In fact, The Mayo Clinic now uses the range zero to nine for your thyroid antibodies. If you have it over nine, then they start considering that you have Hashimoto’s. They say you have Hashimoto’s. We have a big hospital here in Reno, renown hospital that’s kind of gobbling up all of Reno and they use the range zero to nine.
This is like been years in the making. So we have another hospital here at St. Mary’s and they use zero to 32. There are some labs that use zero to 20. There are some doctors that will say, “Well you’re 12,” which is outside of the range of zero to nine meaning you would have Hashimoto’s. They go, “Well we’ll just wait and see if the antibodies get worse.” And something that I’ve never been asked a question on, which is kind of interesting is how much do the antibodies even matter relative to how severe you are? And the answer is they don’t. They just tell you that you have it. So if the antibodies are 300 it doesn’t mean anything more than if they’re 15. So those ranges and those numbers as you can see are quite confusing right now.
Some doctors don’t know what to do with them. Different labs use different numbers. I’ve seen labs where the range was zero to 16. I’ve seen labs where the range is zero to 20. Most of the labs I’m seeing are zero to 32 still. We’ve treated people from a lot of different countries. So I think it’s Belgium that the range of zero to five. There was another country that was zero to four. So it’s confusing. We use zero to nine. Our patients, I have fill out an assessment form before we treat them. And there’s two whole sections on Hashimoto’s and Hashimoto’s thyroid disease. And if they fill out 20 out of 20 symptoms of Hashimoto’s and they’re out of the range, they’re in a range that says they’re normal, we’re probably going to treat them for Hashimoto’s.
Because one other nuance of the range, and you just asked about the range, but a nuance of this is you can be out of the range one day and be perfectly normal the next day. So relative to ranges if you suspect you have Hashimoto’s and you are tested normal, but you somehow know you’ve gone on to doctor Google and found out that you have all the symptoms of it. Then you should run those antibodies a couple of weeks in row. They’re not expensive to run. And then see if they come up. If these antibodies come up positive for Hashimoto’s, more than zero to nine, more than nine antibodies once. If they come up positive, even once you have it, even if it goes away, because some days the antibodies are up, some days you’re in a good mood, some days you’re calm, some days you’re on vacation, and your antibodies go down.
Other days you’re normal and your antibodies are up and so they’ll measure. So that’s kind of an important subject. And I wish I could give you more definitiveness on it relative to what your experiences might be. But the ultimate answer is the range that you should be looking at is zero to nine. If you have antibodies that are over nine at any given time, you should know that you, for the thyroid proxy [inaudible 00:06:53], you should know that you have Hashimoto’s. There’s another one, anti-thyroglobulin antibodies. They’re lower. I’ve seen them zero to one as range. I’ve seen the range zero to three. I’ve seen that all over the place. That one hardly is ever comes up. And it’s interesting, when it comes up, it usually comes up really high. So it’s not really a question of whether it’s one or three. Usually it comes up 30 or 300 or something like that. So that’s a thyroid antibody ranges and those would be, you would be safe to use those ranges. Figure out whether you actually now have an immune attack against your thyroid.
