I was diagnosed with an under-active thyroid aged six. It impacted my growth throughout childhood, and even though I was always the oldest in my year group, I was always the shortest - and that affected my self-esteem more than anything else.
Weirdly, at aged 14 I just stopped growing, while everyone else around me got bigger.
I'm now 40, and have come to live with and accept that I am a short man; standing 5 feet 5 inches.
It hasn't affected my success in life. I've had relationships, been educated, spiraled to the top of my game in my career, married, house, family, dog, cars etc. but I still suffer from the occasional embarrassment of being short - it only really impacts which clothes I can buy, and when I stand up from a table in a pub.
Here's the thing. I recently learned that thyroxine must be taken 30 minutes before eating breakfast, otherwise there is a chance that absorption will be impacted. This advice was not around when I was younger.
Growing up I would always have breakfast, then take my tablets. That was my routine, and nobody ever suggested changing it.
So I've been wondering - would I have grown taller if I had waited the 30 mins after taking my tablets to eat food? For all those years did my body absorb the required dose? Blood tests would seem to think so...
I'm also curious, is it just me who suffered the short height? Did anyone else who had a childhood diagnosis grow to an average/tall height?
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digiwig
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It's going to be impossible to unscramble the eggs here.
If you were being dosed according to blood tests, it might have made little difference. If you were not absorbing it all, your blood tests would have reflected that and your dose should have been adjusted.
We might question what blood tests they used (was it only TSH most of the time?), what they deemed an acceptable result, time between taking your dose and any blood tests, ignoring how you felt, etc.
You appear to be wondering if you undermined your own growth. I say, insofar we can say anything from this distance, "No". It could be related to your thyroid issues somehow, but I wouldn't point at when you took your tablets. And there are many non-thyroid possibilities.
Probably not as you were growing up when doctors were seeing the blood tests as the be all and end all, so they would have titrated your dose accordingly. Certainly hypothyroidism affects growth in children but they tend to catch up one given levothyroxine. There is the possibility that you were not monitored during your teens?
My LD son has growth problems and from the age of two was given Growth Hormones. His condition is Pan-Hypopituitarism with Septo-Optic Dysplasia. He was born at 36 weeks being very small for dates. He was 13 inches at birth and has never really made up the 8 inches (approx) he was short of. At 43 he is now 5ft 4in. Have you ever had your Pituitary Gland looked at digiwig ?
I was going to say much the same thing as nightingale-56 . It's Human Growth Hormone that controls height, not thyroid hormone.
However, the pituitary needs good levels of T3 to produce HGH. So, if you were hypo, and under-medicated - and here I agree with helvella , in that dosing by blood test results depends on what they were testing - it could be that you had low FT3, which affected the production of HGH. But, I don't suppose they ever tested your FT3, did they. And, as you were 14 when you stopped growing, I doubt they considered it necessary to test your HGH, either, as they do with small children who stop growing.
So, the fault is most definitely not yours, it was just the general lack of doctor knowledge about hormones.
Just out of interest, I stopped growing when I was about 12. Up until then, I had been the tallest in the class, then suddenly, everyone got taller than me. (and since then I've shrunk! lol But 5ft 5 isn't a problem for a woman.) But, I think I've been hypo since I was about 8, but nobody ever thought to test me for thyroid. I was just told I was fat because I over-ate, and was lazy and slightly dim. I wasn't diagnosed until I was 55.
I also think I've had low cortisol, B12 and magnesium all my life, judging by what I've read since then, but again, no-one every tested me. These doctors that think they know everything, they have so much to learn!
I just have to chip in here although not quite on topic. Arrogance is the disease that will kill more westerners than anything else. When the British Empire crumbled the Brits (and the Americans) didn't quite get the memo. Western medicine was largely born on the battlefields of WW1. If you don't need it cut out or cut off then western medicine is not much good to you. Chinese medicine, on the other hand, has thousands of years more experience behind it, in prevention first. The Emperor's physician was executed if the emperor got sick (so the story goes)! We could do with more of that here I think
Anyway here we are now with western medicine today still thinking it knows best, despite the recent demonstration from Taiwan and other asian countries who managed to control covid so much better.
I got my covid jab today from a nurse who assumed that my concern about side effects was via gossip from a person who had had them. So not possible that I'd read up on the side effects of the various vaccines that I'd be likely to get, and studied the stats on side effects. It was chilling how convinced she was that she had the right end of the stick and that I was some ignorant wifey who needed educating. I guess this happens more the older you get even before dementia sets in.
I'm with you all the way, there. Except that I don't think Chinese medicine does any good where thyroids are concerned. Chinese doctors are as much in the dark about hypothyroidism as the rest of the world.
Ever hopeful, I tried a course of acupuncture with my Chinese doc who is educated in Beijing and the UK. At the end of it I was still so hypo I felt like I was walking through treacle.
My experiences are very similar to those of greygoose
I'm quite a bit shorter than average compared to women my own age. But at the age of 9 I was the second-tallest person in my class. It was when I hit puberty that I stopped growing. I did have a brief growth spurt when I was 18, but I'm still quite a bit shorter than average for my age group.
I now know that I have a damaged pituitary, but it wasn't discovered until I was in my 50s - and even then the discovery was accidental. But it does suggest that I've most likely had a degree of Central Hypothyroidism all my life (in which TSH production is lower than it should be, meaning that my thyroid hormone levels were also low). I also think I had low iron, low B12 and low magnesium throughout my life, based on many of my symptoms.
One of my (many) health-related complaints about my life is that I had "teenage" spots and eczema right up until my 50s. Then I improved my B12 and other nutrients and my spots disappeared for the first time since childhood, while my eczema reduced in severity enormously.
The one thing that none of us can do is blame ourselves for this kind of stuff. I was brought up by parents who thought that children, particularly girls, were just attention-seeking whingers, and anyone who was unwell was just looking for sympathy and must be ignored unless bones were sticking out and blood was pumping out of somewhere. I was also expected to believe that doctors were never wrong even after they'd been proven to be wrong.
I didn't get 'teenage' acne until I was 50. I thought I was lucky because all through my teens, my skin was soft and smooth. But, I soon made up for it at 50! Terrible acne that had dermatologists scratching their heads. But, that slowly died away when I started thyroid hormone replacement.
I must admit I'm not sure in some cases what has helped me because working on my thyroid hormone levels and my nutrients at the same time as I did, there are some things I think were improved by the nutrients and some that were improved by the thyroid hormones. And I could have got my causes of improvements muddled up.
But I do know that if I run out of B12 supplements that I get spots again, and my eczema gets worse, so I'm pretty confident of that particular issue.
On the other hand, sometimes these things go hand in hand, and maybe you wouldn't get such good results just taking B12 or just taking thyroid hormone replacement. Good idea to leave a couple of weeks between starting two different things, but sometimes that is not long enough to see results. It's all very complicated and like balancing on a knife edge, but little by little things fall into place. I know when my iron is low, but not sure I have any signs of low B12. I just take it anyway. It was never an exact science.
Been on thyroxine for over sixty odd years since about the age of six, only found out I needed it because my mum pushed to find out what was wrong with me, I was one of the tallest in the class at junior school but ended up being one of the smallest at senior school. But in those days you never had regular check ups. Stayed on the same dosage for years. I sympathise with what you are saying. Been through some of it myself over the years.
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