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.
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There's a lot of tests that I run, one of them is food sensitivity tests that have just so many different interpretations and you have to know what those interpretations are. I had one of these this morning, like a note on it, like, well, this says this food sensitivity test says, I should eat this.
This one says, I shouldn't eat this. And which one is it? And both of them were different food sensitivity tests. They had completely different meanings and they were totally congruent in the end.
You need to know the nuances of how that can happen because we're used to looking at blood tests forever, right? You're used to walking in and your doctor goes, your blood sugar is one 102 so you're a little bit over.
But, let's not worry about it yet because it's just early pre-diabetes. That's where we're at. It's like look at these numbers, but we're finding out in chronic conditions that, especially Hashimoto's, you just can't do that.
There's just so many nuances to how you look delve into these tests and understand these numbers. Thyroid peroxidase enzyme, that's the most commonly attacked thyroid enzyme in auto-immunity. There's an anti thyroglobulin one, and then there's another one for Graves, but TPO is it? You say TPO, most people know what you're talking about in that field so that gets attacked.
Then, that starts to make you make more thyroid hormone, you start getting jittery. I have patients that come in and they lay down in front of me, like the one the other day. It was 20,000 but she didn't have heart palpitations, she didn't have anxiety, she wasn't thin and couldn't put on weight.
She didn't have graves' disease. It was like, Oh my God, I have 20,000. I gotta get it down, I gotta get it down. Not necessarily. So the thyroid peroxidase enzyme gets attacked by antibodies to tell your, in Hashimoto's, to tell your immune system to attack that cell in your thyroid.
The TPO enzyme will go up as antibodies affect it, It will go up. However, it's not a measurement of damage to your thyroid. It doesn't, it tells you that your immune system is signaling your white blood cells essentially to kill your thyroid.
But that doesn't mean that they're doing it. It just means that you got a lot of antibodies flying around, telling your thyroid to do it. Now, your thyroid, your immune system might be so suppressed and fatigued, It may not be doing it.
There's a number of reasons that it might not be doing it. I might have a patient who's coming in and they figured out a lot of their food sensitivities and or whatever it is. They figured out chemical sensitivities, or they've taken vitamin D and it may dampen the white blood cell response.
Despite the fact that the person's making a ton of these, of these antibodies that are raising your TPO. So a better marker, believe it or not as to how much damage is being done to your thyroid is the thyroid stimulating hormone, which thanks to many of my colleagues and myself has become like duh, they only do the thyroid stimulating hormone.
Now that's dumb to just do thyroid stimulating hormone. However, when you're evaluating a thyroid or trying to evaluate the whole thing, however, it's an extremely good marker for measuring damage to your thyroid.
If you have a thyroid stimulating hormone, let's use the range one to three. That's the range that I like. Some people are 1.8 to 2.8. Those are really strict. Others are the medical professions, like 0.
4 or 5 to 4.5. So it's just, why? Let's use one to three. So, let's say you're in one to three, let's say you're 2.8. If you're in 2.8 and you are on a certain thyroid hormone, so you're taking a thyroid hormone at let's use 50.
So at 50 micrograms this year, and then you come back the next year and it's 75. And then you come back the next year and it's 125, your thyroid is being damaged. You could have antibodies of 14, you could have antibodies at 20,000.
It's not the antibodies. It's that, it's a part of your immune system is attacking. There's another test that you can tell as to whether that's happening. They're called T and B lymphocytes and natural killer cells.
You can look at those and if those are flared up, you've gotta problem. Nobody even talks about those. They're very, very, not known for some reason. They're just basically a specific panel of the white blood cells that do the killing.
So these guys, these 2000, they don't do the killing. Really, you should run a TSH. If your TSH's, are going up, like every six months, you should probably have your thyroid checked every three months, because in that period of time, your thyroid is being damaged and you'll be getting symptoms.
Basically that's the whole skinny on that. Basically your TSH, if it's normal is going to be telling you, there's not a lot of damage. If your TSHs are going up like this, then these can be all over the place.
These are not telling you. So if you get 2000, do not faint, okay. If you have 2000 and you're not getting heart palpitations and anxiety and insomnia, it does not mean we got to get the number from 102 down to 98.
It does not mean that. I wanted to clear that up. It's actually a pretty wide topic, but I think that really covers the vast majority of what I wanted to say about that without getting too deep into the weeds.
There are other ways to tell how much damage there is. What's really important, but you can use one last thing, you can use that TPO. Let's say somebody comes in here with thyroid peroxidase enzyme up at 500, and let's say, that's how I use it as their baseline.
So we use it as their baseline, then the person's getting better. Getting better, better, better. Maybe it doesn't move, maybe it just stays right there. But then if the patient starts like a year later, they come back and they have a thousand.
Now that'll light me up because that means that they're probably going into an exacerbation. It may be that they go from 500 to 250 when we get them into remission, but I kind of use that. So I'll use that first baseline as okay, here's where they were when they came in here and here's the nuances of how to use that in a clinical way that are relevant.
You can use it for that, but it has almost nothing to do with the actual damage that's going through your tissue. You would be better off by going by your symptoms then going by that. So now that, I think that really covers all the, pretty much the Cliff Notes basics of what you need to know about TPOs of a thousand or 2000 or 20,000 or 10,000 or all the thousands.
So, that's TPO and 10,000.
