Primary care physicians may get along fine using just
TSH tests, "but for a thyroid clinic, we routinely get both" tests, said Dr.
Before they had the
TSH test, the way to determine a low thyroid was to take the basal temperature.
There were 2,932
TSH tests and 2,861 T4 tests ordered during that time.
If we cannot rely on the
TSH test (the supposed "gold standard") to tell when patients who have been treated have the equivalent of their own healthy thyroid function, we can't rely on it to tell us whether an untreated patient has healthy thyroid function, either.
4] and
TSH tests to screen patients for thyroid disease and to document suspected thyroid disease.
Simply changing the normal range for the
TSH test to "less than 3" increased the number of Americans with thyroid illness from 13 million to approximately 27 million.
The second phase of the
TSH tests includes the remaining 34 states.
Also, physicians may attribute other symptoms that could be related to an overactive thyroid -- fatigue, muscle weakness, weight loss, irritability, and insomnia -- to normal aging and therefore do not call for
TSH tests, Sawin notes.
4] and
TSH tests, which were performed at another laboratory just 40 days before this visit, were within the reference intervals.
Datis Kharrazian reports in his book that
TSH tests can come back “normal,” while the thyroid metabolism may still be impaired.
It thus appeared that remodeling a recTSH preparation may provide several good molecular mimics of circulating TSH for further harmonization of
TSH tests.
Given the difficulty of diagnosing thyroid failure in the elderly based on clinical suspicion, it has been suggested that
TSH tests be included in routine thyroid function screening in the geriatric population,(1)(6)(7) but there is controversy about the clinical significance of detecting and treating subclinical hypothyroidism in the elderly.
