Hello
has anyone experimented with serial body temp and pulse readings and compared it with TSH levels? wonder if there is a correlation. There is not much reference to this as a surrogate for thyroid function in PUBMED.
love to hear your thoughts
warm regards
Amith
I don’t have all of my body temp / pulse data easily available, but I think I’ve had a general correlation between those levels and thyroid bloodwork (free/total T3 and inverse correlation with TSH).
I think it might be important to account for other things that can raise the body temp and pulse (like stress) though.
I know my morning and daily temps tend to be pretty normal, say morning temp of 97.7 or above pre-ovulation and 98.4 or above post ovulation, rising throughout the day with an general average of 98.2-98.6. Depends on who you ask but my TSH tends to be on the lower end of normal: .5, .8, always less than 1. And my free T3 also is lower than optimal/normal from a functional perspective but within the lab ranges.
In my opinion this is not classic hypothroidism but low T3 syndrome/ Euthyroid sick syndrome. So maybe that is why I have normal temperatures. Or maybe as you are questioning, the correlation is not very accurate.
I don’t feel like my thyroid works well from a symptomatic perspective. I have cold hands and feet, fear being cold, weak hair and nails, sparse outer eyebrows, exhaustion. Two classic hypothyroid symptoms I do not have are dry skin and weight gain. I have very oily skin and cannot gain weight.
Dan , Emily–thanks for sharing your experiences…i am looking at tracking thyroid functions for hypothyroid. i think i will give it a pass now…and may be check it out later…
thanks again
warm regards
amith
I at least find temp/pulse useful for spotting trends even though there’s more ambiguity than TSH. For example, I think these trends imply that weight loss causes my metabolism to drop and/or morning adrenaline/cortisol to rise:
While that’s not surprising, it’s a pattern that’d be harder to see with (somewhat-variable) TSH bloodwork, at least if done infrequently.
I bet they are looking into this in Mike Snyder’s lab at Stanford. I’ll ask.
hi thanks
the reason a new biomarker is needed for hypothyroidism is that sometimes symptoms of hypothyroidism persist despite normalised TSH levels and TSH levels show circardian variations and vary with time of the day.
.thanks for helping out
warm regards
amith
I asked Xiao Li, author of the recent wearables paper from the Snyder Lab, about looking into this connection. She had a question: How are you measuring TSH? Are these standard blood serum tests you get from a medical lab like LabCorp? How often are you doing them?
hi
thanks for reaching out.
One of our family members is hypothyroid and i was looking for surrogate biomarkers that can replace TSH measurements.
TSH measurements are known to have large intraindividual variation and i doubt if the change in serial measurements can be considered to be clinically relevant.“The reference interval for TSH varies significantly by age, sex, hour of day, and ethnicity.”
I am not planning on TSH measurements other than what is within the primary care /insurance mandate at this point. I wanted to know if some one can point me to studies looking into correlation of BBT or pulse rate to TSH levels or symptoms of hypothyroidism.
I have listed some of my references below:
thanks for helping out,
warm regards
Amith
individual hyperlinks below
Biologic variation is important for interpretation of thyroid function tests.
I also have hypothyroidism and I have taken temperature and blood pressure measurements every morning and night, but the data is too variable for me to draw any conclusions from it. I’ve been thinking about getting a wearable tracker recently because of this. FYI Paul Robinson is big on using temperature and blood pressure for hypothyroidism, but he recommends taking temperatures 4-5 times a day.
