I have been taking 3 grains of WP thyroid. I have been feeling significantly better after I got rid of gluten, dairy, soy, grains, and whatnot but still don't feel perfect. I have a constant tremor in my hands along with whole body pulsating at weird times. I can't say that I am fatigued but certainly have brain fogs which makes me think otherwise. I'm on a ketogenic diet too if that helps to answer my question. Below are my results which was taken 24 hours after my last dose. I wonder if i should've left only 12 hours since the ndt has t3 in it.
Mar 12, 2019Free Thyroxine
1.19 NG/DL
(0.71-1.85 NG/DL)
Mar 12, 2019TSH 3rd Generation
< 0.01 UIU/ML
(0.32-4.0 UIU/ML) L
Free Triiodothyronine
3.7 pg/mL
(2.3-4.2 pg/mL)
Based on my ft3, am I overmedicated? (Adding 20% to my level of ft3 since I took my test after 24 hours). Or should increase it by 1/2 grain. I don't have any issue with gaining/losing weight ever. I am a 24-year-old skinny guy with lean body mass but have a problem with extreme hair loss. I don't know what I'm trying to ask exactly so any input will mean a lot to me since I've been desperately trying to get my body in balance since last 3 years. My ft4 is not that high so I was thinking I could benefit from additional ndt but my tremors/ heart palp and abnormal pulsations confuse me.
PS please excuse my unorganized way of explaining myself.
Thanks a lot
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hypossee
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your symptoms (shakes and pulsing nervy feeling) for me is always over doing the NDT. Just drop 1/2 grain (30mg) per day for a few weeks and see if you feel better. Use your body temp and how you feel to drive NDT and leave the blood tests for doc to worry about. J
It does sound like you are over medicated. Agree jamesa10. Reduce dosage. My experience also that heart palpitations, etc. are symptoms of too much hormone. It can take a while to get dosage right. The body has a way of storing hormone and then dosage levels off / needs to be reduced. I wouldn’t reduce more than 1/2 grain until you see how you feel.
Thanks a lot! I actually tried lowering my dose by 1/2 grain but had some hair loss right away so I panicked and got back to 3 grain. My tremors did get less when I lowered by 1/2 grain for 2 days but didn't go away completely. Does it take about a week or so to get rid of the previous high dosage?
Yes. Try reducing 1/4 grain. It sounds like you are very close to your ideal dosage. Thyroid hormone is powerful medicine, 1/2 grain is actually quite a bit either way (whether taking more or less). And it is an accumulating kind of thing. Backing down or building up in smaller increments works best.
If your T3 was measuring 3.7 pg/mL on a scale of (2.3-4.2 pg/mL) after 24 hours then you are definitely overmedicated. T3 will be very high after you first take it and will then die off to half it's potency after about 8 hours. If you take it about 6am in the morning it should be pretty ineffective by the evening. I shudder to think what it is when you first take your meds. You are putting a big strain on your heart during those early hours.
As everyone has said here, cut back a bit until the jitters die down. I would reduce to 2.5 right away - for a week - then drop to 2 grains. reassess your situation after that then perhaps drop by .25 grains if necessary. But yes, you are going to be very wired if you stay on 3 grains.
Just to put this in context, and yes I know we are all different, I have no thyroid at all and I run on 1.5 grains of Armour and I feel great. For what it is worth, I once forgot and took my NDT before a scheduled blood test early in the morning. My little 1.5 grains registered such a high T3 that my doctor called me within the hour to tell me to suspend all medication immediately and to go in and see him. It was only then that I realized that I had taken my meds before the blood test. So, that's how different the effect of T3 can be. That 3.7 pg/mL would be OK 1 hour after taking your pill, but not after 24 hours.
Thank you so much for your reply. I was thinking so too. Is it going to be a problem if I go down to 2 grains directly? I don't want to get this tremor anymore. also, do you lose hair when you drop your dose? I'm asking cause it happened to me when i last tried it which made me go back to my overmedicated dose
I think not. Simply using the logic that if you ever forget to take your medication one day the sky doesn't fall in. I asked my doctor that once because I was going away for the weekend, we had driven about 200 miles and I realized I did not have my NDT. I insisted that we turn round to get it. I later asked my doc what I should have done. He said that a couple of days would not have hurt.
Sooooo... give it a try. My first choice would be to drop 1/2 a grain for about a week first. The whole problem with finding the right dose is that you have to creep slowly up or down to a critical point, if you do it in too great a step you can overshoot and then you don't know if your symptoms are due to under medication or still overmedicated.
As for hair, that's a problem. That might be a vitamin deficiency. I'm sorry to tell you that I have lost hair being under medicated as well as over medicated. But don't over task you heart just because your hair is thinning. Try researching the latter from the point of view of vitamins and minerals, you might find that a hypo or hyper thyroid condition is leaching a Vit or Min vital to hair health. First concentrate on hitting your critical point. Make sure your Vitamins D,K,B12,Folate and minerals Iron, Ferritin, Selenium and Zinc are all up to par. Ask your doc for these tests first and the ones s/he won't do get them done from a private blood testing lab.
What LAHs said! Great advice. The hair thing? If I can ask are you taking selenium? Yes or no? Selenium helps with the conversion helps optimize the T3 and therefore helps with the hair. Another thing are you gluten-free? I read somewhere that gluten-free can help with the hair - something about the antibodies created by the gluten and how they attack the thyroid and therefore affect the hair.
Hi dtate I wasn't sure if those questions were directed to me so forgive the delay if they were. Yes I take selenium, I eat two Brazil nuts per day which supplies selenium with Magnesium as a bonus. I get them from nuts.com (on the Internet and out of somewhere in the NE of the US). I am not gluten free, I LOVE my Dave's Killer bread with it's 21 different seeds and it's wonderful smell when you toast it. Grilled cheese and tomato on toast is my staple lunch. Maybe that's why I have thin hair as you pointed out - but there is no way I could give up bread, cheese, gallons of milk and eggs from my chickens.
I rarely direct comments towards anyone not really my style - but I am trying to share what’s works for me and what I research. I get it about gluten-free dairy free etc. I can’t do it either anyway not for very long. What I have discovered however, and Isabella Wentz backs it up, is that you can eat these things some of us can, and take digestive enzymes and proteolytic enzyme‘s and get away with it. The problem is is that it takes about 60 days before you notice really much difference. Again, my experience. Learned about enzymes here on HealthUnlocked and I will still continue to share and shout it from the mountain tops. (try enzymes try enzymes try enzymes!!) And for all the nastiness from the sensors on this site, this enzyme advice was free. And the advice does work. So we have to obey the rules - A small price after all. Isabella Wentz wants me to buy her book for $28. And yet, I knew immediately the one chapter that she has in her new book on enzymes and how helpful they are I knew immediately that it was true - she sells her advice! And if I could gently offer another opinion? I don’t believe the Brazil nuts do what 200 micrograms of selenium do.
Something happened I got cut off saw a post script on the selenium. Selenium works kind a like a magnet in the thyroid gland and attracts any circulating T3 and put it to work. With Hashimoto’s we have to remember that it’s not necessarily how much T3 we have circulating in the blood but how much gets to the cellular level level. It’s my understanding to that wheat, at the cellular level looks a whole lot like thyroid hormone. With Hashimoto’s then, our immune system responds by revving up to kill it. Attack on wheat = attack on thyroid = thinning hair. I have almost no eyebrows! So I’m sure the oversimplified explanation above will be attacked. And I could probably find a plethora of links on research. But it is my understanding after reading all that research. It’s also my understanding that we can attack this disease from several different angles. I mention the enzymes? Ha! If we don’t eat the wheat then perhaps we won’t need the enzymes to destroy the house that Jack built! I’m sorry if we can’t laugh at this disease what good is it? Hang in there! We will get through this together. I’m convinced that medicine is going to take a turn very soon and we’re all going to get better treatment real cure kind of treatment. I’m also an rose colored glasses optimist. When enough doctors finally get this disease will see some changes. Not that I would wish this on anyone!
Selenium works kind a like a magnet in the thyroid gland and attracts any circulating T3 and put it to work.
I find that a very odd description of selenium.
Several enzymes which are required in relation to thyroid hormones are "seleno-proteins". That is, they are large, complex molecules which have to contain selenium atoms. Below is an abstract which says a bit more:
Selenoproteins: Antioxidant selenoenzymes and beyond.
Steinbrenner H1, Speckmann B2, Klotz LO3.
Author information
1 Institute of Nutrition, Department of Nutrigenomics, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Jena, Germany. Electronic address: holger.steinbrenner@uni-jena.de.
2 German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Department of Molecular Toxicology, Nuthetal, Germany.
3 Institute of Nutrition, Department of Nutrigenomics, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Jena, Germany.
Abstract
Adequate intake of the essential trace element and micronutrient selenium is thought to be beneficial for maintaining human health. Selenium may modulate a broad spectrum of key biological processes, including the cellular response to oxidative stress, redox signalling, cellular differentiation, the immune response, and protein folding. Biochemical and cellular effects of selenium are achieved through activities of selenocysteine-containing selenoproteins. This small yet essential group comprises proteins encoded by 25 genes in humans, e.g. oxidoreductases such as glutathione peroxidases (GPx) and thioredoxin reductases (TrxR), as well as the iodothyronine deiodinases (DIO) and the plasma selenium transport protein, selenoprotein P (SePP1). Synthetic selenoorganic compounds, including the GPx mimetic ebselen, have also been applied in biological systems in vitro and in vivo; antioxidant and anti-inflammatory actions of ebselen and its history as a drug candidate are summarised here. Furthermore, we discuss several aspects of selenoprotein biochemistry, ranging from their well-known importance for cellular protection against oxidative damage to more recent data that link selenoprotein expression/activity to enterocyte and adipocyte differentiation and function and to (dys)regulation of insulin action and secretion.
Justcto explain more about your results. When taking any form of T3 then results are read differently. TSH will be suppressed, FT4 can be lower in its range but FT3 should be high but never over. So theconly accurate reading is the FT3 so you can't use these figures to show if you are converting well. Ideally you should have. He led that whilst still on T4 if that's what you used to take. However all is not lost. You can reverse conversion issues by checking that Vit D, B12, folate and ferritin are optimal. These help your thyroid to work much better as well and can help reduce symptoms so very worthwhile to do. Be aware though if levels are very low it can take time to reach I good level. But it's well worth the effort. Lots of us supplement but also be aware that if you need to it's often for life as they can drop quite quickly if you stop but also need testing from time to time to make sure not taking too much. You may find a maintenance dose that helps. May help your hair lose as well as general health.
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