Can taking thyroid medication alter your blood pressure? The answer is absolutely. It doesn’t happen all the time, but certain types of thyroid medication can lead to a rise in your blood pressure.
Hey guys it’s dr. child’s here and today i want to talk to you about whether or not the red medication can cause high blood pressure and also we’re gonna answer the question what you should be doing if you have high blood pressure and you think it’s related to your thyroid medication so let’s answer this question first of all and then we’ll get in a little bit to
The nitty-gritty here so does taking thyroid medication cause high blood pressure the answer is not all the time but it actually potentially can in certain situations a lot of that has to do with your dose and we’ll talk about how to manage that if you think that’s what’s happening to you but we’ll get into that a little bit later first of all i want to focus on
Why it matters and then the connection between thyroid hormone and your heart so first of all having high blood pressure is a big deal in fact we know from plenty of studies that having a high blood pressure can lead to lots of different complications ranging from stroke to end organ damage specifically kidney failure to even heart disease so there’s a lot of
Reasons that you want to have your blood pressure manage and if you’re a thyroid patient or just anyone really it doesn’t it doesn’t matter but you want that to be less than 120 over 80 so that’s sort of the optimal range that we’re looking at and so there is a connection between your thyroid and your heart and the way it works is like this so thyroid hormone
Interacts with all the cells in your body but it specifically interacts with your heart in a different way from those other cells and so it interacts on the heart cells and the calcium channel pumps and by activating those pumps that can increase the force of contraction and also the heart rate and that’s how it influences both your heart rate obviously and then
Also your blood pressure so we’re talking specifically about blood pressure here what i want to mention here is that what matters is that you’re getting the exact amount of thyroid hormone to your heart cells and so if you are hypothyroid meaning you don’t have enough thyroid hormone then your blood pressure is probably going to be lower than it should be if you
Have hyperthyroidism meaning you have too much thyroid then your heart or your blood pressure is going to be higher so when it comes to taking thyroid medication you can manipulate or tweak your the amount of thyroid hormone in your body to get you to whatever is normal for you now this isn’t the only way but it’s probably one of the main ways and the same thing
Can happen by the way on your heart rate and so many of you may be suffering from symptoms such as heart palpitations or a rapid heart rate and that can also be directly related to the amount and type of thyroid medication that you’re taking so when we talk about some of the solutions here which we’re going to now so how do you deal with high blood pressure from
Thyroid medication just realize that these solutions there they’re relevant to both if you have high blood pressure and also if you have a rapid heart rate or tachycardia as we as we call it so the first step is you need to take a look at your dose so probably the most common reason that patients experience high blood pressure related to their thyroid medication
Is simply because they’re taking too much thyroid medication so that’s actually a relatively easy fix because all you need to do is drop your dose and that should fix the problem now you can you know well i guess the question is how do you know if your dose is too high so what i recommend that you do is look at your thyroid lab test first of all and then also your
Other symptoms so if you the chances are high that if you have high blood pressure which is related to your dose you’re also going to have other symptoms ranging from hair loss or maybe some weight loss and then of course the high blood pressure and probably a rapid heart rate so these things all tend to go together and they occur in combination but also you can
Actually check your thyroid lab tests so what does that look like it’ll probably look like having a suppressed or a low tsh in combination with a high free t3 or a high free t4 okay so that’s a first step the second step is to take a look at the type of medication that you are using so i said this before especially at in my other videos here but not all thyroid
Medications are created equal and some are better than others and some also have different side effects than others and so when it comes to thyroid medications some medications are much more likely to cause an elevated blood pressure than others and the types that are probably going to cause elevated blood pressure include t3 only medications so you know that is
Learning or sign ml and then of course pretty much anything that contains t3 and that includes medications such as natural desiccated thyroid so these are notorious for causing those issues so what can you do a lot the problem with a lot of people that they may be facing is that they feel really good on their dose of thyroid medication perhaps their their energies
Getting better they’re not experience experiences as much fatigue as they once were maybe they’re losing weight but now they have this high blood pressure so that’s a problem for a lot of people because if they reduce their dose they may reduce their blood pressure but that all those symptoms that they just got rid of might be coming back so that is a big that is
Potentially a big issue for them so what the best thing to do that i found for people who have been in this situation is to take the same amount that they’re taking each and every day but to divide it up so i use an example here let’s see if i can find it yeah so let’s say if you’re taking ten micrograms of site ml each day which is a t3 only thyroid medication so
Remember your heart reacts differently to thyroid hormone than the other cells in your body and it reacts faster and quicker than the other cells do so the idea here would be to take the same amount in the day but to split it up so instead instead of taking 10 micrograms all at once in this case of site ml but this could apply to natural desiccated thyroid or any
Other thyroid medication really so what you would do is you take that 10 micrograms in the day but you take five in the morning five in the afternoon or five in the morning five in the evening or some combination and what that does is it slows down how quickly the t3 is getting to your heart and if you can do that then you’ll reduce the blood pressure because it’s
Not going to be flushed with all of that thyroid hormone all at once the same thing also applies if you have heart palpitations by the way or a rapid heart rate remember those are two separate things and then finally the third step is to consider switching thyroid medications now i don’t really like this i don’t think this is the best option but if you’ve tried
Everything else and nothing else is working then you may have to consider this because you absolute like i said before you absolutely do not want to have high blood pressure for a sustained period of time and by the way a sustained period of time is on the order of months probably closer to 12 plus months you can you have some wiggle room there to play around
With your blood pressure for several months or several weeks that’s not a problem so if you notice that it’s 140 over 90 let’s say obviously we want it less than 120 over 80 but let’s say it’s 140 over 90 you might be freaked out you’re probably not going to feel but that’s not that big of a deal to be at that range for a couple months while you figure things out
So don’t let that freak you out just realize this is not something you want to completely ignore now what you could do is you could just switch medications now sometimes switching from ndt to a t-4 medication may help temporarily you could go from t 3 to n dt or you could go within the same class of medications like let’s say you’re taking armor you could just go
From armor to wp thigh right or to nature throw it or something like that but the whole goal here is to just consider switching your medication you don’t necessarily have to step outside of your class you might be able to stay within it but just try switching things up and then lastly what i want to talk about real quick here is taking blood pressure medication if
You have if you’re also taking thyroid medication and this is important because some blood pressure medications actually negatively impact thyroid function so what does that mean it means that you could be taking that blood pressure medication for your blood pressure for your high blood pressure i should say but that might actually increase the demand of thyroid
Hormone on your body now medications that are notorious for causing this these issues include beta blockers now they’re on they are not the first-line therapy for high blood pressure but they are often used especially in your filling tacker car or if you’re feeling heart palpitations and things like that so a lot of thyroid patients may be on beta blockers whether
They realize it or not now a better solution so well i guess so we’re talking i guess it’s important to make this distinction here in this article we’ve been talking a lot about how thyroid medication can cause high blood pressure but it’s very possible and a lot of people are in this situation where they have hypothyroidism and they have high blood pressure from
A completely unrelated cost those two issues can just coincide with one another now if you fit into that category instead of just taking thyroid instead of taking blood blood pressure stopping or reducing medication it’s better to go after the root cause and so i’ve included a list of root causes here which lead to elevated blood pressure because again you want
To avoid taking any medications that you don’t have to take first of all and second of all you do not want to take a medication that might negatively impact your thyroid so some of the major causes of high blood pressure include in summers and obesity those are two i would say really common causes but there’s more than that including you know excess stress you
Can smoke in can do it a poor diet can do it a lack of exercise all of these things can contribute so you want to focus on those as opposed to taking thyroid medication and blood pressure medication because that combination is just not going to do you well over time so that’s pretty much it guys hopefully you found this helpful again the moral the story is yes
Absolutely some types of thyroid medication can lead to high blood pressure but that doesn’t happen all the time and there are ways to fix it now almost always i’ve been able to just manipulate or tweak the dosing a little bit the time of day or how frequently patients take it throughout the day i know i rarely rarely ever have to completely switch to a different
Medication especially if they’re feeling good so that should be your overall goal but as always treat that blood pressure find the root cause and get rid of it because that will give you the best long-term gain so if you have any questions about this leave them in the comments below i want to hear about it otherwise i will see you guys in the next one
Transcribed from video
How Thyroid Medication Changes your Blood Pressure By Dr. Westin Childs
