Can you summarize the epidemiology, evaluation, quality-of-life issues, and treatment challenges for hypothyroidism encountered by clinicians, including primary care, internal medicine, endocrine, women’s health, and geriatric specialists?
hypothyroidism is uh condition that is very frequent, very common to see in the practice. Uh General internal medicine doctors, gynecologist, geriatricians, they will all see patients that they suspect to have hypothyroidism and that's important to recognize these patients because hypothyroidism, even though it's a slow progressive disease, can impair quality of life in a different way. In multiple ways. For example, we can impair cognition, patient starts to feel low energy, forgetful, difficult to make decisions. But also hypothyroidism has a metabolic uh fingerprint on patients and the patients will have increased cholesterol levels, slightly increasing body weight. Uh so there's something happening from a metabolic point of view and also from a cognitive point of view that combined will slowly progressively uh erode the quality of life of those patients. And I think that's really important physicians to be attend to that and try to diagnosis. Because diagnosis is really simple. Just a measurement of TSH and free T four will make the diagnosis. So it's really not worth having the question or doubt whether or not that patient has hyper pirate is without going ahead and doing the Laboratory. That's necessary for that. Now. We expect based on different numbers that about 4.5 of uh maybe five of the population will have hypothyroidism. So this is a very common disease. If you think that the United States has about 300 million people, You would think that at least 10-15 million individuals have hypothyroidism have been diagnosed with hypothyroidism. So uh that's an important uh thing to keep in mind when seeing patients on a regular basis. Like when the patients come for a physical check up on a yearly basis, physicians should always ask themselves his patient. This patient will, do we have signs or evidence or complaints that are compatible with hypothyroidism And go ahead and do a screening check
