learning disabilaties/ hashimotos

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-27-2004
learning disabilaties/ hashimotos
6
Sat, 08-28-2004 - 4:26pm
I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's 8 years ago, last year our son was diagnosed with learning disabilaties. Does anyone else have this going on? I am in need of advice and direction. Thanks Terrie
iVillage Member
Registered: 11-09-2001
Sat, 08-28-2004 - 11:19pm
Hi Terrie - I don't know about a connection off hand but I can check it out for you tomorrow and let you know what I find. Cathy :)
iVillage Member
Registered: 08-20-2004
Sun, 08-29-2004 - 11:29am
Well this is kind of a tuff question. I know there was some research done in this area about 7 or 8 years ago some for it some against. I think the only thing that most good thyroid docs would say at this point is that they can be symptoms of thyroid disease particurly ADHD and ADD. The problem is that these conditions can also occur without thyroid disease but if other symptoms of thyroid disese are also apperent it would be more likely. if you go to www.thyroidtoday.com from there you can clinck on a link to enhanced pubmed, it freee to join but gives you acess to almost all research papers ever printed in medical journals you can do some searching on your own if you would like.


Eric

iVillage Member
Registered: 11-09-2001
Sun, 08-29-2004 - 11:34am
Here's an interseting article that shows there is a connection. I'll post whatever else I find, too. Hope this helps. Cathy :)

Learning Disabilities in Patients with Autoimmune Thyroid Disease and Their Families

Lawrence C. Wood, MD, FACP

Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston

President, Thyroid Foundation of America, Inc.

Address to the Kingston Area Chapter of the Thyroid Foundation of Canada


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Hyperthyroidism and hypothyroidism are common disorders. Studies done in the United Kingdom and in the United States have given us a good idea of the prevalence of thyroid dysfunction in the population at large, and suggest that there are about eleven million people in the United States and Canada who have an overactive or underactive thyroid, two million of whom do not realize that they are sick. The actual prevalence of the "tendency" toward thyroid trouble is likely to be even greater as suggested by research showing an elevated serum Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH) in ten to fifteen per cent of women over the age of fifty.

Disorders Associated with Autoimmune Thyroid Disease

I have long been interested in this 10-15% of the population who have the "tendency" toward autoimmune thyroid disease. I have wondered what else they might have problems with - what other sorts of disorders might show up in them and in their families because of this tendency.

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The research that has been done suggests that the patients and their families will likely show tendencies not only to hyperthyroidism and hypothyroidism, but also to certain other conditions, more commonly than those in other families who lack this evidence for thyroid problems. Thus we will see an increased risk among those family members for insulin-dependent diabetes, pernicious anemia (anemia due to lack of vitamin B-12), prematurely gray hair, the white spots on the skin known as vitiligo, certain forms of arthritis, and probably certain allergic conditions including asthma, hives, and hay fever.

My most recent interest in the field of thyroid-related problems has to do with an apparent increased tendency for the men in these families to have various types of perceptual learning problems. I say men because males are far more commonly affected than females with these learning problems, though women occasionally may have such problems as well.

I suspect that the reason this relationship has not been noted until recently is that the women of the family tend to get thyroid problems while the men in the family (not seen by the physician as a rule) have the learning problems. In fact it took a chance event to make me aware of this relationship. I have known for some time that prematurely gray hair tends to occur more commonly in patients with autoimmune thyroid disease and in their family members in comparison with the general population. Once, while a discussing this with a colleague who was a pediatrician and who ran a school for dyslectic children, he commented to me that it was his impression that there was an increased tendency toward prematurely gray hair in the parents of children who attended his special school. To prove that such a relationship existed has been difficult and the exact frequency of association is still under investigation.

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Developmental Dyslexia

Before proceeding further, however, I would like to define the type of learning disability (also known as developmental dyslexia) that I am talking about. The World Foundation of Neurology in 1968 defined developmental dyslexia as "a disorder in children who, despite conventional classroom experience, fail to attain the language skills of reading, writing, and spelling commensurate with their intellectual abilities". A subsequent committee expanded that definition in 1981 by including difficulties in the acquisition and use of listening, speaking, reading, writing, reasoning, or mathematical abilities-these difficulties not being due to any sort of handicap or environmental effect.

Children with dyslexia tend to be intelligent, their average IQ being about 130, and therefore are often able to cover up their difficulties if they are embarrassed by them. Nevertheless, an alert parent or teacher may note word omissions in reading, pauses during reading, a marked greater ability in verbal skill as opposed to reading and writing, errors in spelling, poor handwriting, or hyperactivity with a short attention span. There is a tendency for the problem to run in families, and some traits persist in adulthood.

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Quite frankly, I knew very little about dyslexia when I began my studies of this problem, but I was aware that Doctors Norman Geschwind and Peter Behan had shown that both learning disabilities and some forms of autoimmunity were more common in lefthanders than in a control righthanded population. Therefore we began by looking at the incidence of lefthandedness among patients with various types of thyroid problems. In a normal population, approximately 10% of individuals will be either lefthanded or ambidextrous, and that is the frequency of these traits I found among patients with thyroid cancer, nodular goiters, overactive thyroid nodules, and in control patients who had no thyroid trouble. Among such patients and their families the overall incidence of these traits was 11%. In contrast, there was a 17% incidence of lefthandedness and ambidexterity in patients with Graves' disease, Hashimoto's disease, primary hypothyroidism, and their family members.

To gain further confirmation for the hypothesis that learning disabilities were more common in the males in thyroid families, I studied a group of men with thyroid problems. Sixteen out of 22 men with Graves' disease (73%) were lefthanded or ambidextrous, in comparison with three out of 18 control patients (17%). In addition, when these adult men were questioned about traits which might suggest the learning disabilities were present, the incidence of reversals of letters or numbers, stuttering, reading and writing difficulty, poor spelling, grade failure in school, and developmental delays in childhood, were 2.5 times as common among the men with hyper- and hypothyroidism in comparison with the control population.

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Better Screening Techniques Needed

The fact that learning disabilities of this sort seem to be more common in the men and a few women in these thyroid families is not a cause for alarm in my judgement. The high intelligence, good verbal skills, high mathematical skills, as well as the artistic and athletic ability which such individuals often show, make them fascinating people to know and may give them certain advantages in careers such as architecture, engineering, politics, and sales. Indeed, among those known to be "afflicted" with dyslexia are Leonardo da Vinci, Nelson Rockefeller, Gustave Flaubert, Thomas Edison, Agatha Christie, General George Patton, and the Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner.


iVillage Member
Registered: 11-09-2001
Sun, 08-29-2004 - 11:38am
Here's another one that is kind of general but it shows the effects of hashi's on the brain. I'm just giving the link here because she has a lot of complex pictures on her site - (of totally unrelated stuff!): http://vitamvas.tripod.com/brain.html

Cathy :)

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-14-2003
Mon, 08-30-2004 - 3:34pm
I was diagnosed with dyslexia in the second grade. During the times I was trying to concieve and having my five children (and six miscarriages) I was informed that I had anti-cardiolipin antibodies which was an auto-immune response to pregnancy. I was diagnosed with ADD at 39 and at 41 (last month actually)I was diagnosed with Hashimotos. My children are wonderful. Son #1 is 15, son#2 is 14 with adhd and dyslexia, son#3 is 12 and is add with aspergers, son#4 is 11and Adhd, dyslexic and bi-polar, daughter is 8 and may be very mildly add but the jury is still out. If there is a connection it might make sense to me but the research I have done is not at all conclusive and sometimes contradictory. Good luck. Mary
iVillage Member
Registered: 08-27-2004
Thu, 09-02-2004 - 4:19pm
thanks for your response, it is just so frustrating to not know if I had been treated while I was pregnant would this still have happened, my frustration is more for my child that he is the one who has to struggle so hard. It sounds like you have your hands full but I hope all is going well for you and your family. I guesws my wonder was if anyone was doing any kind of studies to see if there were any connections, I have seen some articles but not much. Thanks again Terrie