Has anyone heard/thought about a thyroid hormone implant?

[ilyfunnybunny]

It seems like nearly everyone has a problem with their thyroid medication, and the best therapeutic innovations would involve bypassing the digestive system, with a hormonal or thyroid cell implant.

Aside from experiments with mice, this is the only page I found related to a concrete effort to produce better thyroid therapies:

titanpharm.com/pipeline/t3-...

I'm curious about what other people think, or have heard from their friends or physicians, and if anyone here has any experience/expertise in how the public can help push certain medical innovations along.

[Clutter]

Meawaldrip,

Research into transplanting thyroid glands has been under way for some time. I thought the Russians were fairly close to trialling a transplant in animals a couple of years ago. My thyroid surgeon thinks that it may be possible to transplant a thyroid gland into the arm as they do with parathyroid glands.

I think we may be a long way off the T3 implant considering we don't even prescribe slow-release T3 in the UK.

[TangoMang]

Thanks for the link to Titan regarding the T3 implant. I would certainly be a candidate. It appears they are in the pre-clinical stages of this. Appears they fast tracked the sub q implant for probuphine. Many struggle with diodinase dysregulation and can’t take T4. Juggling daily doses of T3 can be tricky. The generics have personally made me sick in the past. Also knowing there was an FDA recall here in the states in June 2018 and again in August does not make me feel safe about taking generics. As a nurse I have always thought a sub q approach with T3 would be an interesting option. I have had patients on sub q morphine in the past and the small tubing would be changed every three days. Not sure about Titans product or where they might be sourcing the T3. This is all very interesting to me as a patient and a nurse. Not so certain the T4 pushers are going to be happy.

[helvella Administrator Thyroid UK]

Afraid I missed this when you posted it but belated thanks for doing so.

Whilst I have reservations, it does make a lot of sense if it can be demonstrated to be as safe and as reliable as it needs to be.

My feeling has been that some sort of positively controlled dosing mechanism would be a better first step. That could be adjusted and managed in order to accumulate clinical data on how well the patients do when dosed by an implant. After all, if one of these slow release implants is too much, the stick would have to be removed. If not enough, another stick added. Then move over to see if the super-simple slow-release approaches can work as well as managed implants.

[BitterSweetS]

When you see the advances for other endicrine illnesses like Diabetes and the wearable technology for testing blood levels and medicating all in one makes me wonder why we arent more advanced in this field. Makes me wonder if its because this illness effects mainly women and the corrupt drugs companies making money off the meds this isnt push forward. I was thinking we need to create an App to help with blood results to track and advise on meds on here. Small wins but might help people, ive found various things online but nothing slick enough....I might look into creating one for myself and see where it leads.

[ilyfunnybunny in reply to BitterSweetS]

Hi bittersweet,

Gender absolutely has something to do with the poor attention the medical field pays to so many diseases and disorders (endocrine, autoimmune, post-viral, etc). A historical lack of research into these predominately female diseases, on top of present-day gender biases in diagnosis, lead to a lot of sick women who no one is helping. Let me know if you’re interested in any articles/books on this, it’s a professional and personal interest of mine so I read on it a lot.

Also, scientists only believe what they can see, and as of now there aren’t any reliable tools they can use to explain and measure thyroid symptoms (patient testimony, of course, but it’s too easy for doctors to disregard this). Blood tests can give them a peek into the problem, but as so many experiences on this forum demonstrate, the blood tests certainly don’t give a full picture.

New tools to observe thyroid levels over shorter intervals of time, like those used to measure insulin (rather than one blood sample at a single time of the day on a single day of the month/year), might be extremely useful. Cool idea. Not sure about using an app just to track blood draws taken over long intervals though. I could definitely see it being more convenient, maybe helpful if it also allowed you to 1) list the dosage and meds you’re taking at the time of the draw 2) keep a symptom diary, and if 3) it could draw conclusions from patterns in the blood/med/symptoms data, like what your personal optimum TSH, T3, or dosage is.