RyanCarey comments on A Medical Mystery: Thyroid Hormones, Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia - Less Wrong

23 Post author: johnlawrenceaspden 14 February 2016 01:14PM

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Comment author: RyanCarey 15 February 2016 10:26:22AM *  5 points [-]

I've only skimmed this but let me give a bunch of info that seems relevant. (As I understand it, the question is whether low thyroid levels could cause chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia). For background, I am a junior doctor with no specific experience in endocrinology and support healthy scepticism towards the medical establishment:

  • Thyroid hormones are of course the first thing that one thinks of in people with low mood. Sometimes one will check the T4 and T3 as well as the TSH.
  • it is also one of the first things that one would research and it looks like there are plenty of papers checking hormone levels in these conditions.
  • People with hypothyroidism usually have high TSH. It would be surprising if this was different for people with fibromyalgia unless they had a specific insensitivity to thyroid hormone, which seems like a different hypothesis.
  • people with hypothyroidism usually don't complain of pains in the same way as people with fibromyalgia.
  • people with fibromyalgia usually have a high sensitivity to slight painful stimuli in a way that I've never seen from people with hypothyroidism.

I also must admit that the since the post seems to me to be not just wrong but also very slow-moving, I haven't read all of it. I would suggest rewriting this in a few paragraphs with citations to get feedback on a more brief version.

Comment author: RyanCarey 15 February 2016 10:36:32AM 1 point [-]

A likelier solution would be that pain-sensitivity and vulnerability to demotivation and fatigue are just (mostly additive) polygenic traits. Look to partially confirm this in 0-5 years when the first GWAS come out and demonstrate that thousands of genes make these diseases more likely, similarly to IQ and height.