I posted on behalf of my 19 year old daughter about 18 months ago about her extreme fatigue, lack of energy, digestive problems, not feeling refreshed after a long sleep, etc. At the time she had a full blood count & thyroid panel (TSH & FT4 only) and I posted her results for your consideration (1st set of results). We looked again at her diet, dealt with a Vitamin D deficiency and her GP prescribed a course of Folic Acid & ruled out celiac with a blood test.
Over the past 18 months her fatigue has worsened, she still has little energy, suffers dreadfully with headaches behind her eyes (a few times a week) has had a head MRI to rule out anything nasty following an observation by her optician and struggles to walk without suffering extreme calf pain at the end of the day. She has also mentioned brain fog days & not remembering events that friends have talked about. Not sure if it is relevant but she has always been quite pasty & has cold feet & hands. While at uni’ she continued to go back & forth to her GP with all these complaints and apart from prescribing Ferrous Fumerate, when her Ferritin dipped below range, she got nowhere & continued to suffer with her symptoms. We have since found out that the GP put Chronic Fatigue Syndrome on her notes but didn’t tell her. Despite the negative celiac test she has been gluten free for 8 months and it has had a major impact on her digestive health in a positive way.
My daughter is now 21, graduated from uni’, has moved home & should be having the time of her life but she isn’t well enough to. In order to give her new GP a fresh set of results to work from, ahead of her first appointment at her new surgery, I paid for private blood tests to get a full picture of her thyroid and vitamin levels (2nd set of results). I posted the results in the Thyroid UK forum and it was pointed out that her elevated Thyroglobulin antibodies…280 (0 - 115) could be high for several reasons....Type 1 Diabeties, Pernicious Anemia, Thyroid Cancer, Hashimotos or Collagen Vascular diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. They also pointed out that an Active B12 result under 70 was considered suspicious.
We took these results to her new GP who agreed to do some of these tests (3rd set of results) and has referred her to an Endocrinologists because they didn’t know what her thyroid results meant. They have done an updated full blood count too which I can give you details of if it will help. For some reason her GP has also referred her to a Mental Health team (no idea why, letter arrived a few days ago). I haven’t included her thyroid results here as TUK are helping me with this bit. Here are her B12 & Folate results. I also have full blood count results should you need any other test results (1st & 3rd)
1st …18 Months ago...
SERUM B12 303 (180 - 700)
FOLATE 3.8 (4.6 - 18.7)
2nd …July 2018
ACTIVE B12 53.1 (25.1 - 165)
FOLATE 3.84 (2.91 - 50)
3rd … August 2018
SERUM B12 226 (211 – 911)
FOLATE 7.6 (>5.38)
Intrinsic Factor antibody 2 (0 -24) **I understand the unreliability of this test** Haemoglobin A1c level 37 (48 cut off for Type 2 Diabeties) ??
My apologies for the long post and thank you for reading this far. 2 years of doing everything we / she can to help the situation is getting us nowhere. Her diet is good, no alcohol, no late nights but symptoms are worsening and increasing. We haven’t gone down the B12 supplement route yet as we knew this could skew tests and results. I understand that this could be Hashimotos and the beginning of her thyroid journey (I’ve got the T-shirt for this one) but do you think her GP should be addressing her Active B12 level from July & low Serum B12 result from August? Or… should we just get on with it ourselves and try the B12 sublinguals (the route I took to raise my levels)? I don’t want to go down this route if this is more serious than a sublingual.
Thank you
Anxious Mum