Geek Out: A Conversation With - A Thyroid.
240 Americans:
I had to do some Math here!
The resource below stays that 123 million thyroid hormone prescriptions were written in 2016 – I calculated that in one year there are 365 days, each with 24 hours and each of those with 60 minutes, making a total of 525, 600 minutes in a year (or I could’ve just looked up the song lyrics from “Rent”!).
If you divide 123 million by that number of minutes, you get 234, close enough to 240!!!
8:
Starting at the top of the body, these are pineal gland, hypothalamus, pituitary gland (although strictly speaking that’s two glands), thyroid, parathyroid, pancreas, adrenals, gonads (either ovaries or testes depending on your 23rd pair of chromosomes – you might consider going to “we need to talk about sex” if you’d like to read up on that a little more).
Hormones:
At around the start of the 20th century, people realized that there were chemicals being produced and released into the blood stream that affected cells all over the body. Using Latin or Greek terms was pretty on point at the time so a brilliant researcher called Starling decided to take a Greek word meaning to excite or set in motion, hormone, and that’s where the word hormone came from because hormones excite cells to do things!
Take a look at this article if you’d like to know more 😊
https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1113/jphysiol.2004.073056
Thyroid hormones:
There are actually two thyroid hormones which are typically just lumped together and referred to as the “thyroid hormones”. But for those of you who’d like to know, they’re actually thyroxine (also called T4) and tri-iodothyronine (also called T3). Our thyroid produces and releases more T4 which travels to our cells, loses an iodine and then it becomes its more active sibling, T3!
Major controller:
Other things affect BMR, for example being male, having more muscle and being a young rather than older adult – all these things give you a higher BMR. However, they might actually all be connected to muscle – being younger or male (or both!), tend to increase muscle mass and boy does muscle tissue convert food to energy at a fast rate!
Heart:
This is why people with an overactive thyroid gland will get palpitations as that over-production of thyroid hormones can push their heart into overdrive.
Developed world:
I checked far too many resources to mention here about the best terminology to use for what we used to call the 1st world - this seemed to be fairly widely accepted but not universally so. If you have an opinion on this and/or useful resources, I would love to talk about this further with you.
Nuclear accidents:
Tend to release a lot of radioactive iodine into the atmosphere which thyroid glands suck up rather vigorously!
Unfortunately, thyroid cancer is a potential side effect of using radiation therapy for the treatment of head and neck cancers but for most people is definitely a risk worth taking as for the most part, especially when diagnosed early, thyroid cancers are eminently treatable – take a look at this resource for a discussion of this side-effect of some radiation treatments:
https://www.ahns.info/survivorship_intro/hypothyroidism/
