Suffocation

[Ali1101]

I feel like my body is not breathing at all! I have to do it intentionally to get some air into my lungs. I always have low oxygen (below 95%) .  Are these typical hypothyroid symptoms?

[shaws Administrator]

I am sorry you have a distressing symptom at present. I have looked on your Profile but there's no info. Are you hypothyroid - what is your dose of levo how long since you were diagnosed?

[Ali1101 in reply to shaws]

I just updated it. I'm taking 150 mcg of levothyroxine and my doctor thinks I have secondary hypothyroid due to low TSH from pituitary gland.

[Ali1101 in reply to Ali1101]

I was diagnosed since almost a year.

[shaws Administrator in reply to Ali1101]

Thanks.  If you've not had a recent blood test for your hormone, ask GP to do one which includes FT4 and FT3. even though you are on 150mcg of levo you might not be converting sufficient to T3.

The link below you can take some excerpts to your GP. I don't know whether the addition of T3 will be helpful as Dr L says T3 only.

web.archive.org/web/2010103...

 (keeping in mind I'm not medically qualified)

[marram]

One symptom of low thyroid levels, which is not reconised by most doctors and endocrinologists, is what the Late Dr Lowe called 'air hunger'.

This link quotes the article in full:

facebook.com/ThyroidDisease...

[Pastille in reply to marram]

Good article. I have had a lot of breathlessness lately and just put it down to my age. this kind of confirms it for me though, thanks marram 

[humanbean]

One cause of air hunger is iron deficiency. Have you ever had a full iron panel done? This would include ferritin, serum iron, transferrin saturation, and total iron binding capacity. In addition to that a full blood count would be very useful too.

If you have had all these results it would be good if you could post the results for us to see. It would be a lot of typing though!

[Pastille in reply to humanbean]

Humanbean do you know if this symptom can be present with just very low ferritin when hemoglobin and RBC are fine? My ferritin was 14. Others were mid range 

[humanbean in reply to Pastille]

Probably. Have you had serum iron, transferrin saturation, and total iron binding capacity measured?

Have you ever seen this link - the table at the bottom is very helpful :

irondisorders.org/Websites/...

What makes things awkward for diagnosis of any kind of anaemia (and the associated symptoms) is that people can have more than one kind of anaemia. If one of them raises ferritin (for example) and the other reduces it, you could end up with normal ferritin suggesting you are absolutely fine.

Another issue that I've read about is that people who are hypothyroid and inadequately treated have low blood volume. The blood they have may appear to be fine or nearly fine, they just don't have enough. And that makes people breathless and suffer from air hunger.

Edit : Determining low blood volume is very difficult indeed. I've never heard of anyone having it tested.

[Pastille in reply to humanbean]

I will take a look, thank you