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.
Is Hashimoto’s disease genetic, and there’s been a lot of going back and forth on this ever since Hashimoto’s was discovered. It’s essentially an autoimmune disease, which means your immune system, which has been tasked with the almost ridiculously impossible task of killing bacterias, killing viruses, detoxing things, protecting your tissues from anything that is bad and attacking that without attacking you.
Pretty amazing, it’s a pretty amazing thing. And then as time has gone on, we have had a kind of an evolution of society, and you’ve probably heard me talking about this many, many times. And next thing you know, we’re staying up late, we got poor work hours, we’re eating genetically modified foods, we’re taking tons of drugs that we didn’t take before. A lot of those stuff have chemicals in them. We have tons of chemicals. All these things flare up immune responses and then they can start attacking tissues.
The thyroid tissue is arguably the most sensitive tissue that there is. And so that makes it kind of the most vulnerable tissue. And then basically, you violate that immune system, you overload it, it kind of gets a little confused. And the next thing you know it actually flares up too much, and then it starts hitting vulnerable tissue. The thyroid has a receptor site for its hormones in every single cell of your body, every single one; trillions. So probably the only thing it has that, maybe blood sugar has that, maybe glucose has that.
So anyway, but so it’s an auto immune problem, it kind of develops the same way all these autoimmune problems are developing. Having said that, I think the question probably comes from the fact that we now are looking at histories. For example, if the mom has it and she has a mom who had it, and she has a … Let’s start that over again. If you have a female patient, she’s got a mom, she’s got a daughter, she’s got a sister, she’s got another sister. Two of them today, in today’s age, are probably going to get it. So it’s like a 50/50 type of a thing.
And so from that perspective, you could argue that it’s genetics, because now once you have turned it on in the first person, their DNA has said, “It’s okay to attack me, my immune system. I know you’re supposed to only attack those viruses and bacterias and yeast and molds and all that type of stuff, but you can attack me now.” And once your immune system attacks you, it creates what’s called a polymorphism in your DNA and now you’re susceptible to it. You can pass that on, you can pass that genetic propensity to develop it to your offspring. And ultimately, we see these pods all the time. We see that the mom has it, the grandmother has it, the sister has it, the brother may have it occasionally.
And so there’s a developing genetic component to it for sure. But you can have the DNA to actually get it and not get it. So that’s one of the problems is that with a lot of people using genetic testing for these today, they’ll tell you that you have the propensity to get it, and people will maybe think that that means you have it and start treating you for it.
But yeah, in the end, it’s developing a genetic component, where we’re starting to see it more and more and more in family lines. So I guess the answer to that is yes.
