Thrive In Pregnancy & Breastfeeding

Thyroid Changes in Pregnancy 0:00

Hi. It's Dr. Jen. Welcome to the mini Talks When we're going to talk about thyroid and pregnancy and breastfeeding. So your thyroid is such an important and different organ, as we discussed at the summit and it gets a little tricky during pregnancy. So during pregnancy, we definitely want to make sure that the thyroid is being evaluated properly and that is with its age and at3 free T3 and a free for the important thing about the free T4. This is yes, the inactive thyroid hormone. However, this is the hormone form of thyroid hormone that passes through the placenta to the baby.

So pregnant women need to make sure that they have an adequate level of T4. So it's crossing through the placenta and this you're going to want to be around one. And I, I had Hashimoto's during a few of my pregnancies and then r one and then after the first one then it was in remission. But we still had to make sure that my three T4 was staying in that really narrow

Adjusting Thyroid Medication During Pregnancy 1:23

zone of around one while I was pregnant. What happens is when you're pregnant you have an increase of the thyroid, thyroid globulin, binding hormone. So you're more bound with your thyroid hormone. So you might have to increase your dose of thyroid medicine. There's actually studies that have shown that you need to increase. You're usually most people are the center of it. That's not always the best. You have to increase that by 25% when you have your first missed period. And unfortunately, a lot of times women are not even getting into their OBGYNs and getting bloodwork until they're in their past, their first trimester, or sometimes even 12 weeks.

So if you think or know you have a thyroid issue, you definitely want to get in right away, get the proper lab work, work with your functional or integrative physician, and make sure that you are on top of that right away, because that is when the baby developing baby, make sure they need that hormone. Now let's talk about breastfeeding.

Thyroid Health and Breastfeeding 2:25

So breastfeeding, you want to make sure you have adequate fibroid hormones. And a lot of times when women are struggling with breastfeeding, I always say to them, have you checked, done a full annihilation of your thyroid? It's a lot of the times if we have hypo or low acting thyroid, hypo hypothyroidism, low thyroid hormones, then you're not going to produce as much breast milk. Okay. And that's another thing that we really have to make sure that we are checking postpartum or common radiology or checking a full thyroid panel.

And we're making sure that that is adequate and that the mother can produce breast milk for the growing baby, which breast milk is amazing for for infants. So those are two things that are really important. Also, thyroid is important for fertility also. So very, very important gland. As you guys have heard during these summit talks, we definitely want to make sure we're on top of this. We want to test and not guess and do a full evaluation. Thank you so much for listening to this mini talk with me.

I hope you enjoyed it.