Can Thyroid Disease Get Better?

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Can Thyroid Disease Get Better? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times Times best selling author, celebrity nutrition expert and fitness hall of famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Christine G. From Instagram asks, can thyroid disease get better? Hey, it's J.J. and I've got the perfect person to answer this question. It's Dr. C. AKA Dr. Alan Christensen. He is a board certified naturopathic endocrinologist and New York Times bestselling author. And he's just come out with his latest book, the Thyroid Reset Diet. Plus, he is the vision of health, a super athlete, and one of his favorite things to do. Mountain unicycling. Yes, really. We'll be right back with the answer. Stay with us.

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This is a really important question when I hear quite a bit, and I'd like to just break this out into a couple ways to think of it. One of which, going away can mean feeling better, you know, and having the ways in which thyroid disease affected your health and your symptoms. To have those leave you and let you feel like you did before the whole thing started. Other another way of thinking about that would mean to have the disease go away and no longer need to be on treatment for those who are on medication. And this one comes up a lot. There's often a frustration about, you know, understandably about the illness and feeling like your body's betrayed you, like it's no longer doing what it needs to do by itself. And now you're dependent upon this thing from outside of you. It's completely understandable, the angst around that. So that's another definition. And for going away. So let's also talk about types of thyroid disease. We've got the structural disease, which is where there's nodules, there's lumps, there's goiters, there's thyroid cancer. And then we've got the functional thyroid disease, where there's too much or too little hormone, and much of that is caused by autoimmunity, by immune attacks going after the thyroid. And we've got the most data on those having possibilities of remission, especially Hashimoto's and Graves. Now, I want to differentiate remission from improvement. Remission means the thyroid is healed, it's working fine again and again. That's independent of symptoms improving. So with Graves disease, when someone has stable thyroid levels and they're no longer hyperthyroid, there's a really high chance that the disease can go into remission. There's actually been some papers showing that once someone has stable thyroid levels, their odds of going into remission within 18 to 24 months are roughly 90 to 95%. So, yeah, you heard right. The vast majority of people with graves, if they can stabilize their levels, the whole disease process quits. And it turns out that high amounts of thyroid hormones they drive and they perpetuate the autoimmunity that causes graves. So when the cycle is broken, many can get better. Now, with Hashimoto's, we have less clear data. There's fewer good studies on that because it's often a more chronic condition. Some that have been done on younger people suggest that a remission rate may occur in the 25 to 27% range. So those identified as having autoimmune thyroiditis, not treated, but viewed in the future, have been shown to reverse about a quarter of the time. And clinically, I've seen similar things, not by hard, closely analyzed data sets, but just subjectively, I would see a similar response rate, and I would argue that can be higher when someone has stabilized their blood levels. It turns out that having too little thyroid hormone with Hashimoto's can also drive part of the autoimmunity of Hashimoto's. So there's that. Now, the exciting thing is about just rates of possibility of improvement for those that have low thyroid function. I'll talk in other questions about how that's been shown to be the case after low iodine diets. But studies have shown that remission rates can be upwards of 80% for people who modulate their iodine intake in a deliberate way. And in terms of probability of improvement, it also depends upon than how much the thyroid was the sole cause of their symptoms. So if someone's talking about their symptoms getting better, it's pretty common that the symptoms are wrapped up in the thyroid levels, the autoimmunity, but also other conditions. So those who are prone to thyroid disease are also prone to other things that can occur at the same time. And these can include things like anemias or sleep apnea or hyperparathyroid disease. And these are things that cause big symptoms all by themselves. And so that's a case to where someone may achieve normal thyroid function and still have persistent symptoms. So there's also differences in terms of how much thyroid tissue someone has left if their gland was removed. You know, I used to always say that that would mean that they would need treatment long term. I've seen cases where that wasn't true. People who had thought they'd had a total thyroidectomy must have had a few wayward cells missed and the thyroid grew back again. So that's by no means common, but it is possible. So most cases, if your thyroid's taken out, you'll need treatment forever, but then also if it's highly shrunken. So some with Hashimoto's, the gland atrophies and it gets smaller and it withers. In those cases, long term treatment's generally necessary, but from what we know from studies, a quarter of the time with doing nothing good or bad, Hashimoto's can probably reverse itself. That number is likely higher. With those who do things to improve their health and those not yet on treatment or on treatment for under four years, that number can be as high as 80%.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetojay.com.

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