Fatigue common with brain fog among adults with hypothyroidism

Those categories that contained at least 50 individual responses were included in the final analysis. Participants were also asked to provide any additional comments “to help researchers better appreciate how you experience brain fog.” The complete survey is provided in Supplementary Fig. A wide range of conditions can affect psychological and neurocognitive function and cause brain fog symptoms. These include lack of sleep, dehydration, medication side effects, depression, sleep apnea, menopause syndrome, vitamin B12 deficiency, chemotherapy treatment, celiac disease, systemic lupus erythematosus, chronic fatigue syndrome, and COVID-19, among others.

You may want to consult a sleep specialist to determine whether the drug is affecting your ability to get deep sleep at night; lack of deep, restorative, delta sleep could be the culprit for your daytime tiredness. Unfortunately, taking any medication on an empty stomach often increases propensity to experience stomach aches. Some individuals find that stomach aches diminish with continued, regular synthroid administration.

• On the other hand, some side effects that may have been nonexistent over a short-term, may only emerge after an extended, long-term of synthroid treatment.
• People with undiagnosed or poorly managed hypothyroidism often report forgetfulness, difficulties finding the right words, and lack of attention.
• The most common responses have included sleep, exercise, nutrition, and stress reduction (9).
• Nearly half of all participants (46.6%) reported experiencing brain fog prior to the diagnosis of hypothyroidism.

Subclinical Hypothyroidism

It is also understood that lack of moisture from the tear glands and tear ducts can cause inflammation, which could lead to blurred vision and/or eye problems. It may be necessary to consult your doctor, as well as an ophthalmologist (or optometrist) for further information. Switching medications may reduce eye dryness and/or visual changes, but you may need to safely utilize an exogenous moisturizer if your eyes continuously dry out from the synthroid.

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• Women are much more likely to get Hashimoto’s disease than men, and the condition occurs most commonly during middle age.
• Minimizing your stress response via activities such as deep breathing and/or meditation may reduce the severity of insomnia as a side effect.
• In addition to further psychoeducation, neuropsychologists can provide cognitive rehabilitation, which has been shown to be beneficial in a variety of clinical populations with cognitive symptoms, including attention, memory, and executive function (72–79).
• If you have cognitive symptoms or have demonstrated significant functional deficits, talk to your doctor about repeating thyroid function tests.

Term of administration

• Cognitive symptoms of people with hypothyroidism include memory problems and difficulty concentrating.
• Focusing specifically on LT4-treated hypothyroid people, the literature regarding HRQoL, mood, and cognitive outcomes is divergent and inconclusive.
• In addition, the survey was designed to be minimally burdensome to encourage participation and to not restrict the study to a specific location.
• To ensure that your fingernails stay healthy while taking synthroid, you may need to carefully monitor your nutritional intake as well as consider various adjunct dietary supplements.

There was a negative correlation between treatment satisfaction and expectations for more support from their general practitioner. These results highlight the central roles of patient expectations and their relationship with their health care team in determining treatment satisfaction. There are models to help understand and predict the interplay of psychological adaptation and chronic medical conditions, which provide additional insights into possible relationships between hypothyroidism and psychological distress. Illness representation plays a critical role in adaptation to a chronic disease and is related to levels of depression and anxiety (90). In many cases, side effects experienced when starting synthroid will diminish and/or subside after several weeks (or months) of treatment. When any new exogenous medication is introduced to the body, it disrupts homeostatic processes and can trigger side effects.

Thyroid Problems and Dementia Risk

In the end, if you’re exhibiting major cognitive decline, your healthcare provider should conduct a comprehensive assessment to determine if medical conditions aside from your thyroid disease may be contributing to your current state. Women are three times more likely than men to develop hypothyroidism—a medical condition in which the body does not produce enough thyroid hormones. Highlighting this issue, there is a remarkable quote from a hypothyroid patient during the recent joint thyroid association conference (16).

Textual data analysis was performed to identify common areas of concern from open-ended survey responses. Could most treated hypothyroid people have adequate tissue levels of T3 in the brain and are therefore asymptomatic, while a subset has tissue hypothyroidism in relevant brain areas, which manifest as brain fog? Lending credence to this hypothesis, there is a common polymorphism in the DIO2 gene, Thr92Ala, which may reduce catalytic activity of the enzyme and/or alter the intracellular Golgi apparatus (56).

Many of the ThyPRO items and scales appear relevant for identifying and quantitating brain fog in hypothyroidism, but some of the scales are irrelevant (e.g., hyperthyroid symptoms, eye symptoms). Given the complexities of creating a new survey instrument, validation could begin with a focus on the ThyPRO-39 items contained in relevant subscales, as piloted by Ettleson et al. (4). Brain fog in survivors of cancer has been most studied in breast cancer, where it is commonly reported as “chemobrain” or “chemofog” by patients during or following chemotherapy (8). Animal and human studies provide evidence that specific cognitive domains dependent on the hippocampus and/or frontal lobes are affected, including attention, memory, processing speed, and executive function (17). This has been found in studies assessing patient-reported symptoms (18) and those using objective test measures assessing mean level performance as well as variability (19–23).

Associated Data

Most people notice a racing heartbeat and/or as if their resting heart rate is considerably faster than usual. This is likely due to the fact that synthroid can be stimulating to a user’s physiology, especially when ingested at a high dose. Heart arrhythmias should be regularly monitored, synthroid dosing should be reviewed, and adjuvant strategies to normalize heart rate may warrant consideration. Others may find that they wake up during the middle of the night, but are unable to fall back asleep after this waking.

The most frequent symptoms respondents listed were lack of energy, forgetfulness and sleepiness. Changes to behavior or diet and thyroid hormone replacement were the factors that synthroid anosmia most frequently improved or worsened brain fog symptoms. Ettleson said there was a wide variety of responses participants gave when asked about how they deal with their symptoms. Categorical variables of interest are presented as proportions, and numeric variables are presented as means and standard deviations.

Hashimoto’s thyroiditis is an autoimmune disease in which the immune system produces antibodies that target and progressively damage the thyroid gland. If you are already being treated for hypothyroidism but still have brain fog, you may need more aggressive thyroid treatment. Shomon suggests talking to your doctor about increasing your thyroid medication or adding a medication like Cytomel to your standard levothyroxine (e.g., Synthroid or Levoxyl) treatment. “You may need to switch to a natural desiccated thyroid drug like Armour or Nature-thyroid to resolve your brain fog,” she says.