Increased Risk Of Stroke for Thyroid and Diabetes Patients!
Attention: If you or someone you know is stricken with diabetes along with low thyroid, known as hypothyroidism, then you MUST read this article. Your life may already be hanging on by a thread, a thread that your doctor doesn’t even know may be unraveling quickly.
Research has shown that diabetic patients are commonly found to have concurrent thyroid disorders.
In comparison to the normal population, diabetics have over 30% more hypothyroid disease, an 11% increase in postpartum diabetes and studies have shown that diabetics have over 5 times the incidence of sub-clinical hypothyroid disease compared with the normal population!
An autoimmune disease known as Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis accounts for between 70%-80% of all hypothyroid disease cases in American adults. It is the most common cause of hypothyroid in the adult population. In people with hypothyroidism caused by autoimmune disease it has been found that they have, as a group, multiple other conditions along with the hypothyroidism.
It is known that patients with one organ-specific autoimmune disease are at risk of developing other autoimmune disorders, and because thyroid disorders are more common in females, it is not surprising that so many female diabetes patients have thyroid disease.
One problem that arises with having these two conditions together is that, due to the diabetic state of glucose dysregulation, glucose is inefficiently transported to the cells and the metabolism of glucose is diminished. This results in an increase of glucose in the blood stream.
As a result, the body will convert the excess sugar to triglycerides to be stored in adipose tissue for use as energy when it may be needed.
Because hypothyroidism decreases the overall rate at which you burn calories (Think of the thyroid as your body's furnace) and low thyroid also slows down hormone production, your triglycerides are more likely to remain in your fat cells because of the lowered energy needs of the body, this is one reason many people with low thyroid have cold hands and / or feet because the byproduct of energy production is heat, so if the bodies “furnace”, is functioning below what is required, one symptom could be those cold hands and feet.
Hypothyroidism may also increase your LDL levels (low density lipoproteins, which are wrongly called our “bad” cholesterol) by increasing the absorption of cholesterol through your liver, preventing it from effectively eliminating excess cholesterol.
So you see, diabetes causes you to make more triglycerides and then hypothyroidism helps you to keep them around, either stored as fat because you don’t utilize them for energy or within the bloodstream.
High triglyceride blood plasma levels are one marker used to show increased risk factor for heart disease, atherosclerosis, metabolic syndrome, transient ischemic attacks (TIA) and stroke.
In fact two studies found that increased triglycerides were a more reliable marker for future strokes that LDL or that so called “bad cholesterol”.
Prior to these two studies elevated LDL levels were always deemed the prime suspect in the development of stroke.
In the first study that was done, spanning over 4 years, researchers at UCLA collected data on more than 1,000 patients who were admitted to the medical center for TIA’s.
All of the study patients had fasting lipid panels drawn the day following admission to the hospital. After comparing the lipid panels, researchers found that patients with the highest triglyceride levels were 2.7 times more likely to suffer a stroke than those with low triglyceride levels.
LDL levels, however, showed no correlation to stroke risk.
A 2001 study reported similar results. An Israeli team of scientists’ analyzed more than 11,000 patients, all of whom had coronary heart disease but had never suffered a stroke.
During an 8-year follow-up period, 487 of those study patients had a TIA or full-blown stroke.
In studying these patients’ findings along with those whom had high triglycerides, researchers determined that diabetics with thyroid conditions who had triglyceride levels of 200 mg/dL or more had a 30% greater risk of having a stroke than patients with normal triglyceride levels.
This information has been around for over 10 years, and if your triglycerides have always been an issue in your blood panels, has your doctor ever explained this to you?
If the doctor does any reading of research at all they should know this connection between Diabetes, Hypothyroidism, Glucose, Triglycerides, Heart Disease and Strokes.
If they don’t acknowledge this and, instead continue to prescribe you statins for your supposed high cholesterol, then maybe it’s time for you to find a doctor that does actively search out the newest, life saving research.
You deserve to have a health care provider that actually provides “health improving care”, not just “keep you from dying care”.
Think about the definition of medicine: The prevention, alleviation, or cure of disease.
Knowing that definition would you say that, in your opinion, the doctors you see for your health, have they prevented any of your diseases? Have they cured you of any of these disease conditions?
I bet the your answers to those 2 questions is a profound “No!”. In fact, when you have your blood chemistry tested and a blood chemistry result comes back on your test that is out of range the doctor probably tells you "We'll watch it.", not giving any explanation or a limited explanation at best about what they are watching and waiting for.
Well let me clue you in, this “watch and wait” is really a code for “We need for your health to become worse because, in reality, you aren’t sick enough for the type of care that we provide.”
That's Not Health Care, That's Sick Care!
This is why you continue to deteriorate as the years go by because no one is trying hard enough for you! They aren't getting to the root cause of your problems.
You need a health provider who is willing to investigate your health in order to find what the cause of all these problems you are saddled with. A health-rejuvenating clinician that doesn’t blame your "Bad Luck" for what you are going through.
Saying a person with your health is just unlucky is a cop-out. It is a lazy doctor’s excuse to be incompetent. It's their way of dealing with their inadequate and falsely labeled “health care” treatment.
The best that you get from the medical doctor is an attempt to alleviate your symptoms, but even then they are ignoring this huge elephant in the room that I just went over with you, which is:
Triglycerides, Not Cholesterol, Is How You Assess The Risk Factor Of A Future Stroke In Those Patients With Both Hypothyroid Disease And Diabetes!
You are invaluable to your family, friends and loved ones, don’t you think you are deserving of a doctor who’s life mission it is to contribute to his patients allowing them the opportunity to achieve the most optimal health imaginable?
A doctor who will look at your health as a whole so that you are afforded the very best care by using his knowledge of the human body and all it's systems to find the common cause of your multiple health system issues! That doctor would then need to know what to do for you so that you are no longer burdened with that always present fear that comes with the uncertainty of not knowing when the next “health crisis” shoe will drop causing you to become even more ill.
To live is to be able to enjoy your life as it was meant to be, it's not just going through the motions of the day unable to do the things that you love because of your poor health. Isn't it time to stop beating your head against the wall and change the direction of your life? Well then you are going to have to find someone that knows how to look at hypothyroidism and diabetes from a functional perspective.
Has your doctor even tested you for an autoimmune thyroid? If not, how does that doctor know what in the world is really going on in your body?
The doctor you entrust your health, and ultimately your life with needs to look beyond the labels of hypothyroidism and/ or diabetes so that they are able to do some real, health improving detective work to find the root cause(s) of your specific issue(s).
Do you get blood work results that are out of range and yet your doctor doesn’t seem to concerned with those pathological findings, telling you that we’ll just watch those results and see how they are on the next follow-up and when that time comes the doctor does the same thing again? Worse yet, does your doctor not even acknowledge the negative results and instead tells you that your blood work is fine, making up some lame excuse like it’s ok for your age and weight?
If that's the case it is imperative that you find someone who understands the interaction between Hypothyroidism, Diabetes and the rest of your body's systems.
The combination of these two diseases in one individual is a deadly serious problem that cannot be swept under the rug and ignored, you must find a doctor that fully understands the gravity of this situation and will give it the attention it deserves by analyzing all the facts from a functional medical perspective.
Fortunately, I have spent many countless hours on these specific disease processes. I have the background, knowledge and desire it takes to get to the root of your problems so that you don’t become a statistic of an ever increasingly cold and incompetent health care system.
Patients often times are forced to blindly travel down the path of poor health as it meanders along due to a doctor that is either far too busy, too lazy or just too damn stubborn to stay up to date with the most current scientific research.
Chronic health conditions such as these are given the most inadequate of care in our current health care system and a huge reason is the health insurance companies. You see, they are the controller of the money and they dictate what care a patient will receive; many times a doctor is unable to exercise their full clinical skills due to the fact that they wouldn't be reimbursed by the insurance company as well as they dare not go against what has been set as the "Standard Of Care" for a particular health condition even though that Care is generic in that it is based on the diagnosed condition and not based upon an individual patient's uniqueness.
Unfortunately our health care system for the chronically ill patient is broken and patient care is no longer based on the individual but instead, it is has become an assembly line of “cookie cutter” treatment protocols that do not deviate much from patient to patient within the same diagnosis.
If you have been in the medical system for any length of time, you know this to be the case.
You are expected to wait, sometimes hours after your appointment time to see the doctor, then, when you finally get into your exam room, the doctor asks you a few questions, may or may not order blood work and then write you a couple of prescriptions for Synthroid®to cover the hypothyroid and Metformin® for your diabetes.
They can’t take the time to explain why your blood work is the way it is, nor will they have an answer as to why you continue to feel as you did before beginning your thyroid replacement hormones and the diabetes support medications.
Don’t you think you deserve better than what you have been getting in regards to your healthcare?
Isn’t your life as important as anyone else’s?
Shouldn’t the doctor you employ to recover your lost health make it his fundamental duty to do all that is within his God given talent and power so that you no longer continue on the downward spiral of decreasing health in which you find yourself now?
If you are finally sick and tired of being sick and tired and you want to find someone that cares as much about your health as you do, then call my office at 281-812-8101 and set up a free, no obligation Health Recovery Workshop so you may see for yourself that there is hope and you are not destined to live a life of misery.
My door is open for those that want to take responsibility for their own health and stop relying on some profit driven, corporate health insurance company with their doctors that feed into this international profit driven machine at the expense of their patients’ health and many times the patient pays the ultimate cost by losing that same health and life that they and entrusted with the doctor to protect, nurture and improve.
If you have any questions or just want to sit down and talk about the possible solutions to your health issues, then please give my office a call at: 281-812-8101.
If you want to learn more please go to my website at:
In Health,
Dr. Walter K. Crooks DM (P), DC, CCCN
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