Thyroid Function and Trauma

People often ask why they become hypothyroid. While I can never answer this question thoroughly, I usually give them a possible cause by asking about their childhood. Thyroid function is always essential, but several times in a human's life, the volume of this function is more crucial than others, and adequate thyroid function is more important for women than men. Two of these times, having enough thyroid hormone in circulation is essential for women than men. These times are prenatal, childhood, puberty, pregnancy, and trauma. I've discussed how important thyroid hormone is for brain function and how mental health issues are (some say always) associated with low thyroid function. Thyroid hormone regulates cellular function in the brain. It stimulates mitochondriogenesis.Interestingly, it's T2 hormone, the one no one ever talks about, that does this, not T3. The brain needs more T3 than any other tissue. T3 receptors are found in neurons, mostly in the hippocampus and amygdala, the brain regions governing mood, memory, and learning. Even mild hypothyroidism, if sustained for a long time, may cause irreversible damage to cognitive function because it reduces the size of the brain. People have also asked me how stress and trauma affect thyroid function, specifically in childhood. I will include adolescence as childhood, although adolescents are on the cusp of adulthood, we now know that the brain continues to grow until the late 20s. This means the need for optimum nutrition to form a healthy adult brain continues far longer than we realize.

Healthy breakfasts and lunches are crucial for young children, even though these choices usually include sugary carbohydrates. Schools and governments seem to worry less about teenagers' nutrition. Adolescents undergo the stress of puberty but are considered adults and often go off malnourished to college or to work. The human brain, which begins with the formation of the neural tube, continues to evolve until years beyond when most young people are taking on adult responsibilities and stress. What could go wrong? Thyroid function.

The US DSMMD (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) measures if someone seeking therapy has experienced trauma. Stress affects parenting. Poverty will affect nutrition, but no medical system I can think of considers thyroid function as something that the dire experiences of poverty, war, abandonment, refugee status, and sexual abuse will damage. Iron is on the UN list as an essential nutrient deficient in women and children—if women are deficient, so will their children be deficient. The RDA for iodine is so low that all women and children, even those not experiencing trauma, will be deficient. The thyroid makes its hormones out of iodine. Hence, a deficiency affects the development of cognitive function and behavior in children, adolescents, and young adults.

What needs to be understood is that any stage that requires more thyroid hormone will be nutritionally expensive. It's not just iodine but also iron, zinc, magnesium, cholesterol, etc., or any nutrients you get from eating meat that are needed to provide the raw materials for growth, development, function, and energy. You cannot take iodine, eat muffins and pizza, or drink caramel lattes; you can expect healthy thyroid function. Stress and trauma are excruciatingly nutritionally expensive. The sympathetic nervous system will burn through all of your nutrients like a house on fire if you are suffering from chronic stress. Iodine is undoubtedly one of them.

So, if you made it out of the womb with adequate thyroid hormone (often complicated by the frightening amount of young mothers who are not euthyroid because their doctors do not regularly test their free T3 levels), the next stage when thyroid levels need to be higher than the commonly accepted and far too broad "euthyroid" range is puberty.

In puberty, the thyroid hormone grows in volume to accommodate the need for a higher rate of hormone production that comes with the formation of sexual characteristics, including skeletal size and body composition. A 2001 Swiss study measured changes in thyroid function during puberty and found thyroid volume grew between the ages of 11-15. However, there was already a surge in TSH at 9, followed by a steady rise in circulating thyroid hormone and increased peripheral tissue conversion from T4 To T3. The study found that thyroid levels reached adult levels at 15 but that females had increased T3 levels during the pubertal changes, which coincided with a skeletal growth spurt. This paper did not measure the increase in iodine uptake by the thyroid, but it is well-documented that thyroid uptake of iodine increases by 40% during pregnancy. Since more iodine is needed to make thyroid hormones, iodine-deficient girls are more likely to be susceptible to hypothyroidism in the future.

Unless there are rare steroid hormone imbalances that cause conditions such as Turner's Syndrome, sexual characteristics will develop whether there is adequate T3 hormone or not. Other tissues will not get the quantity of thyroid hormone they need. In the case of deficiency, tissue receptors for thyroid hormone become less sensitive to T3. When the development is finished when teenagers are between 15 and 17 years old, reduced sensitivity to thyroid hormone production can lead to reduced production of the hormone. Iodine deficiency contributes to this situation.

Individuals can live for decades in this state, never getting diagnosed because, since the 1970s, medical diagnosis has focused on TSH levels and not the myriad of symptoms clinically associated with hypothyroidism before the isolation of TSH. Unfortunately, this has caused terrible ignorance in medicine. TSH is sensitive to few tissues—and only pituitary, kidney, and liver tissue seem to express their need for thyroid hormone through TSH signaling. Every different tissue in the body regulates its thyroid hormone metabolism. If thyroid hormone levels are insufficient to provide what each tissue needs, they cannot communicate this to the thyroid. TSH will not rise higher if one tissue is not getting enough. There is constant alarm about adolescent depression in the press and medical literature, but no one is measuring adolescent thyroid hormone levels adequately.

Stress will cause an equally dangerous deficiency of thyroid hormone and iodine and lead to low thyroid function for the same reasons above. If stress is prolonged, there is an endocrine domino effect from a sympathetic nervous system response to trigger our sympathetic nervous system to act on adrenergic receptors, generate a fight or flight response, and finally, a thyroid response. Any stressful sensation, such as yelling, hitting, hunger, fear, or abandonment, can cause thyroidbeta-adrenergic interactions, which raise brain cortisol can become toxic and damage neurons in the hippocampus of the brain. Amazingly it took brain fuel to put out this fire, and ketones were the most effective fuel for reducing the damage. Childhood trauma usually occurs at a time when thyroid hormones are needed exponentially more than in adulthood. Thyroid hormones are specifically what a child's growing brain needs. If stress occurs, even more so, thyroid hormones will be required to mitigate and survive that stress. Now, if you add trauma at any of these points, you have a perfect storm.