Test results - confused?

[greenivy54]

I have had problems with hypothyroid symptoms since puberty but I put it down to just experiencing a few minor problems due to health problems. I had a baby 9 months ago and ever since have experienced awful symptoms, I’ve never felt worse in myself. Struggling with every hypothyroid symptom I’ve seen. My test results came back and both myself and dr are confused, were pretty confident that it’d come back high TSH but this is what I got. Is the lower T4 indicative of anything, is it low enough to make me feel ill? Had a full blood screen to assess my general health and everything came back normal - no other problems or explanation for how I’m feeling. Help please!

[greygoose]

What time of day was the blood draw? TSH is at its lowest around midday, which is why it's always advised on here to have the blood draw before 9 am. But, even so, it wouldn't be massively high.

Your FT4 is low, yes, but just testing TSH and FT4 doesn't give you the full picture. You also need FT3 and antibodies to know what's really going on. There are so many possibilities.

T3 is the active hormone needed by every single cell in your body. And, it's the lack of T3 that causes symptoms. T4 is basically a storage hormone that doesn't do much until it is converted into T3, so doubtful it would be the cause of your symptoms. And TSH doesn't cause symptoms at all. It's just a messenger between the pituitary and the thyroid.

Had a full blood screen to assess my general health and everything came back normal

'Normal' just means somewhere within the so-called 'normal' range, which isn't always 'normal'. And just being somewhere within the range doesn't completely rule out other problems because the ranges are usually much too wide.

[humanbean]

While you were pregnant your baby was taking lots of thyroid hormones and nutrients from you. This can have long lasting effects.

Suppose your iron and/or ferritin (iron stores) levels were fairly low before you conceived but were within the reference range. It is unlikely a medical professional would have noticed if it was in range but low in range.

During childbirth itself you could have lost a lot more blood and then been even lower in iron / ferritin.

Just to give you a specific example, if your ferritin was 20 mcg/L at conception and the reference range was 13 - 150 many doctors wouldn't even notice. But someone with a result of 20 would probably feel much better with a result somewhere between 90 and 110 mcg/L. Both the result of 20 and the result between 90 and 110 would be in range and would be considered "normal" but they don't have the same effect on the patient's health.

The same type of comments can be made about all sorts of nutrients, for example :

Vitamin B12, folate, iron, ferritin, vitamin D

The above are the nutrients mentioned repeatedly on this forum and optimising the levels makes a huge difference to someone's feelings of "wellness".

There are other nutrients that could be low that might effect some people, for example :

Selenium, zinc, copper (this could actually be high), magnesium and some others.

Obviously your thyroid hormone levels need to be right for you as well. But having good nutrient levels is vital too.