What Are the 5 Stages of Progression With Hashimoto’s?

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Five stages of progression? With Hashimoto's. This is JJ Virgin, four time New.

York Times bestselling 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. Tracy from Instagram asks what are the five stages of progression? With Hashimoto's all right, this is a first. Here on the Ask the Health Expert podcast, I've got the father of one of our guests who's been on a couple times you all know and love Dr. Will Cole. Well, now I've got Dr. Bill Cole. His dad is on today to be answering questions for you. So Dr. Bill Cole is a functional medicine expert and a health coach and he is the founder and creator of the key cellular, nutrition and cellular health accelerator programs. And he there, by the way, with a team of more than 30 dedicated health experts educate individuals on the steps needed to start improving their well being. His specialty release the 40 to 65.

Year old women market.

So I'm like, come on over to Dr. Bill. Also. He has been a competitive bodybuilder, skilled hunter, avid golfer, but for the last 36 years his biggest passion is natural health and that's been his main focus. So I am super excited to have him with us today. Stay with us. We'll be right back to answer that question.

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Yeah, and this is. It's one of those questions, JJ, where you're. It's not going to be cut and dried. You can have overlap here. And so it's not going to necessarily be, you know, finally delineated. But generally, stage one is where the person has this, what we would call genetic predisposition. They have weak genes that if those genes are triggered, then they will start to manifest the symptoms. Now, at this point, they haven't been triggered. They just have that genetic susceptibility. There's no antibodies showing up in their blood. Essentially, they have no symptoms. At this point, it's going to be the person, though, that should be on the lookout. If they have a parent who has Hashimoto's right, they're gonna be much more likely to develop that themselves. So, you know, but at this point, just be clear. There really are no symptoms. Okay, so stage two now is gonna be where you have immune cell infiltration. This is specifically gonna be white blood cells, in particular lymphocytes that actually start to accumulate in the thyroid gland itself. A person in this stage, about 80 to 90% of the time, they're going to start to show an elevation of antibodies that's going to be what's called tpo, which stands for thyroid peroxidase, and then tga, which is thyroglobulin antibodies. They're also going to likely be starting to see some symptoms at this point. Fatigue, anxiety, weight gain. Are three that cropped up right away. For most people, I think it's really, really important to understand, though. In this stage here, every single person who is showing antibodies, they always have an impaired gut wall, meaning they have what we call a leaky gut in medicine. It's called intestinal permeability. Over 1600 studies show that this thing exists, and it exists big time in people who have autoimmune disease. So it's something that if you can catch early enough and you can start to reverse that, dealing with this leaky gut, you can shut this process down and people can see, from my experience, they can see their condition reverse. The third stage is what we call subclinical hypothyroidism. At this point, they might start to show an elevated, what's called TSH test. That's the gold standard test doctors utilize to determine whether somebody has a thyroid problem. They will not be generally showing a decrease, though, in T3 and T4, which are two specific thyroid hormones. That's generally going to still look normal. But it's also very possible now that they're starting to see even more symptoms that relate to thyroid issues in stage four. Now we're in what's called overt hypothyroidism. Now we're dealing with the thyroid gland actually starting to fail. The attack from the antibodies on the thyroid cells is damaging and even destroying these cells. And at that point now you're going to get a reduction in the production of thyroid hormone. That's going to be evidenced by a much higher TSH level in the body. And also now T3 and T4 hormones are actually going to show low in the blood. With most people, whenever the thyroid is starting to be destroyed, that person is going to also probably need to be on medications at this point because they do have this deficiency. In stage five, we're dealing with a progression to additional autoimmune diseases. Here's a fact. We know that 50% of people, I'm sorry, 70% of people who have an autoimmune disease like Hashimoto's will develop a second autoimmune disease. And then 50% of those people will actually develop a third autoimmune disease. The reason being we're not addressing why that's there. It's continuing to exist. We can treat it like with Hashimoto's by giving more hormones, but because we're not addressing why that immune system has gone so dysfunctional, it'll ultimately begin to attack other areas of the body in most people.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert.

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