Hashimoto’s Disease – Test

Transcript

“Hashimoto disease is best diagnosed by doing some basic blood work. Following are the Hashimoto’s disease tests that you should get. Number one is to check for the amount of thyroid hormones that are present in your body. Now, this is a basic blood work that’s all the people will get when they want to get their thyroid levels checked. But there are different kinds of thyroid hormones that your body produce. So it is very important to get all the thyroid hormone levels checked in your body to make the correct diagnosis. The most common blood work that is ordered to check for thyroid disorder is called TSH, which is thyroid stimulating hormone. Now, this TSH is a hormone which is created by your master endocrine gland, which is called pituitary gland. So pituitary gland produces a TSH and the work of TSH is to go to the thyroid gland and starts producing thyroid hormone.

Now, if your TSS levels are high, that means you have a low thyroid condition or hypothyroidism. And if your TSH levels are very, very low, that means you have a high thyroid condition, or sometimes it is called Graves’ disease. Most commonly in Hashimoto’s disease, the TSH is elevated because as I said, it leads to hypothyroidism. But as I said, it is also very important to check the other thyroid hormones. And the other thyroid hormones are T4 and T3. So to get the complete thyroid hormone levels checked, you need to get checked for TSH, T4, and T3. Now the next set of blood tests that you should get is to check for thyroid antibodies.

Now, remember Hashimoto’s disease is an autoimmune disease and your body starts producing antibodies. So we need to check those antibodies to make sure that you do have Hashimoto’s disease. The two antibodies that we can check in your blood, one is TPO called thyroid peroxidase antibodies. And the other one is called thyroglobulin antibodies. Both of these antibodies levels are high in Hashimoto’s disease. So make sure that your doctor is checking these antibodies to confirm that you have a Hashimoto’s diagnosis. So as you see it, it’s very simple to check you for Hashimoto’s disease by doing this blood work.”