Hashimoto's Disease, Hashi's, Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, Hypothyroid Disease, Hashitoxicosis, Panic Attacks, Panic Disorder, Anxiety Attacks, Social Anxiety, Hyperthyroid, thyroid disease, Graves Disease

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How to Read Your Labs

If you are ever diagnosed as having a Thyroid problem, you are going to want to familiarize yourself with some lab terms and what all those numbers mean.  Its not too complicated to understand.  Learning a little about labs will help you with other illnesses as well.

How Labs Work:

In a nutshell, a lab will draw blood from a vein in your arm.  Depending on the test they will be performing you might need to fast (not eat) for 12 hours prior to the test.  Additionally, certain hormone tests are better to test in the morning and others are better to test at night.

Once blood is drawn, the lab will do its thing and essentially come up with a number for you depending on what they found.  That number will be placed within a reference range to show how your blood looks in comparison to the average of other people.

For instance, the picture above is a snapshot of one set of my labs.  This set of labs shows my Hypothyroid and Hashi's Disease.  In this example, TSH has a reference range of .4 - 5.5.  My score in this case was 9.119.

My score is obviously not within the range so we know right off there is a problem.  For me, it's Hypothyroidism.  Next take a look at the second set of number, Thyroglob Ab and Thyr. Perox. Ab.  See the reference says NEGATIVE is less than 75 IU/mL (International Units per Milliliter).  My numbers were 326 and 1,014!  Keep in mind that BOTH those numbers were supposed to be under 75 for me to be negative.  These numbers in this case are Thyroid Antibodies.  In short this high number means that antibodies are attacking and killing my Thyroid and eventually my Thyroid should stop working completely.