Assessment of the Adequacy of Thyroid Hormone Replacement Therapy in Hypothyroidism

[PR4NOW]

This came out in Frontiers In Endocrinology. Some are considering symptoms again. PR

"Background: Recent studies identify a significant number of treated hypothyroid patients who express dissatisfaction with their therapy. At present there are sufficient measures of thyroid function to enable the clinician to establish a diagnosis of thyroid disease with a high degree of sensitivity and specificity. The purpose of this study was to quantitate the use of a new and novel assessment of clinically relevant hypothyroid symptoms in the management of patients with thyroid disease and to identify a tool that could help clinicians to assess adequacy of LT4 treatment."

frontiersin.org/articles/10...

[AmandaK]

Thank you, an interesting paper. I was surprised at how few symptoms were given for participants to identify during the study though it was based on indicators before TFTs, and especially TSH, were used as the main diagnostic tool.

[PR4NOW in reply to AmandaK]

AmandaK, it is far short of hypothyroidmom's list of 300 but at least they are starting to consider the patient presentation after years of ignoring us. PR

[AmandaK in reply to PR4NOW]

Indeed, a significant step forward and let's hope that the paper is read far and wide.

[helvella Administrator Thyroid UK]

I very much support the return of symptoms to the picture of hypothyroidism and its diagnosis.

This type of questionnaire does raise questions in my mind. For example Dry skin with the options Absent/Minimal/Mild/Moderate/Severe. I find it trivial to dismiss "Absent" - I definitely had dry skin. But it is far harder to choose among the other four options. Dry elbows which never felt as they should regardless of how much grease I applied. Hands that I would make into fists so as to reduce the feeling of dryness. But nothing like the flaking I have seen on some who have desperately dry skin.

It really needs a bit of guidance as to how to respond.