Medical Information on the Thyroid

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Dr. David Cathcart. I am a family practice physician at Heartland Regional Medical Center in St. Joseph, Missouri, and I've been asked to talk to you today about thyroid disease. I'm going to talk just a little bit about the medical side of thyroid. Again what usually happens is when someone gets autoimmune thyroid disorder it is usually a condition called Graves disease, there is another one called Hashimoto's thyroiditis. But essentially what happens your thyroid starts to over function. But when you have too much thyroid hormone, it makes your heart race, you tend to lose weight, your hair may start falling out, your skin gets kind of oily, people get sweaty. That disorder can be not only make one feel terrible, but it also can be dangerous for your heart. And so what we tend to do typically is treat that with a medication called radioactive iodine, it's called I131. Which is basically is a isotope of iodine, and you take one or two of those pills of this radioactive iodine, and it literally is taken up in the thyroid gland, and the radioactivity destroys much of the overactive thyroid tissue. You know when we eat salt most of our salt is iodized, and meaning it has iodine put in the salt. Iodine is an important part of our diet, because if we didn't have it our thyroid would not function well. And that is the whole reason why we have iodized salt. Well I131, or the iodized or the radioactive isotope of iodine is taken up by the thyroid, because it thinks it is iodine, and it wants to make thyroid hormone out of it. But once it gets in there the thyroid is tricked, and it burns off or kills much of the overactive thyroid tissue that is causing the problem. Now the thyroid starts to quit producing so much thyroid hormone, unless you get just the right amount the thyroid may quit functioning all together. Consequently, what we do about that then is get people back thyroid hormone as a pill. There is various brand names on the market, but essentially it is just a thyroid replacement hormone that you take one a day. Back in the old days of treating this what we use to try and do is give just the right amount of radioactive thyroid, or that I131 to just turn the thyroid down so it won't produce so much hormone. That became too difficult, and became much easier to control the thyroid by turning the thyroid completely off by giving enough I131 to kill all the remaining thyroid tissue so it doesn't produce too much anymore. And then just supplement someone's thyroid hormone needs with pills. The great thing about it is it is very easy to control, the medicine is very cheap, and it works beautifully. So that is pretty much the medical information on thyroid. This is Dr. Cathcart, and thanks for letting me talk to you about thyroid disorders."