Hello,
I have been diagnosed with graves somewhere in June this year. I acctually decided to test my self...had an old lab paper to do my urine and I simply underlined the thyroid to be tested as well. 3 days lated my GP called my my results came as TSH 0.02 T4 23 and T38.5... had a few tests and ws diagnosed with Graves. I was scared because they where soooo ready to kill off my thyroid like imediatly withing 15 min of anouncinig me the diagnosis...well I descided not to do it as I wanted to know more about my new condition. I consalted with my GP and we agreed that I should try the medication first. While waiting for an appointment with Endo...i red a lot from disscusion boards and started taking omenga 3...selenium ...and ALCAR added more fruits and veggies to my diet...2 weeks later my T 4 was at 19 and T3 at 6.7 TSH still at 0.02 at that point I was prescribed Tapazole 5 mg per day...and I continued everything else as well...2 weeks after taking meds I tested T4 12 T3 4.6 and TSH 1.18 ...my GP called me in to confirm that everything is going well. Than I retested again 4 weeks later and my T 4 went up to 15 TSH to 3.12....in the mean while I did stop ALCAR since i was afraid to go hypo too fast...and a week before testing last time i felt so tired all i wanted to do is sleep...and I was sure that my T4 will be too low but it was not it started going up as u can see....and that confuses me why did it go up to 15 from 12...thanks for any info
I can only guess why this happened, One - you might possibly have Hashimoto's thyroiditis in addition to Graves and two when your TSH went up to 1.15, you needed to make an adjustment to your Tapazole dose and/or your ALCAR dosage or stop ALCAR altogether or take Regular L-Carnitine instead if ALCAR. When I experimented with taking supplements, especially Acetyl-L-Carnitine, my Free T3 ad T4 were right at the bottom of the range. I experimented because I was more concerned with getting my TSH to rise which is why I tried the Acetyl-l-Carnitine. While it worked well in raising my TSH, it required a lot of adjustment of Tapazole dosages and acetyl dosage in order to keep all my results where I wanted them. What I saw on this Board with people who had Hashimoto's is that they did better taking Regular L-Carnitine instead of Tapazole and not Acetyl-L-Carnitine at all. Some people have both Graves and Hashi's and that is really hard to regulate but not impossible. So at this point in your case, your doc needs to lower the dosage of Tapazole at least to 2.5 mg and you might try switching to Regular L-Carnitine 500 to 1,000 mg in addition to your other supplements. Then depending on where your results are next testing, you might have to make further adjustments. 2.5 mg is about the lowest dose you can take of Tapazole because it is such a small pill and after it is broken to half (2.5 mg) the only way to adjust the dosage is to take it on alternate days. You don't want to stop your treatment until your antibodies are tested and found to be normal or non-detectable. Even then in my case, I continued for 3 days a week at lower dosages for a long time because i was afraid to stop altogether, I stopped in April of this year and am just about to take another test now in September. From what I have seen on this Board's postings, all hyperthyroid patients lose vitamins, minerals and amino acids like carnitine when they are running hyper and these need to be replaced. Before I added any supplement, I always asked my doc to test my value for that particular deficiency and the tests confirmed I was deficient in them.