Dara was 32 years old when she signed up for Quantify, after struggling for years with fatigue, depression, brain fog, constipation, and weight gain, and not getting anywhere with conventional medicine.
Her primary care doctor had ordered a complete blood count (CBC), comprehensive metabolic panel (CMP), and thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) to investigate what was going on, but when her test results came back normal, she didn’t have anything to offer, other than a prescription for a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), for her depression.
A software engineer at an early-stage startup, Dara knew the importance of identifying and addressing the causes of complex problems—rather than trying to force something to work with a superficial solution—so she wasn’t thrilled about taking a medication that she knew would be palliative at best, and that wouldn’t address the underlying causes of her symptoms.
What’s more, when Dara asked her doctor if there were any other tests that she could order, she dismissed the question, implying she didn’t know what else to order beyond a basic evaluation.
Frustrated by her doctor’s lack of outside-of-the-box thinking, Dara decided to pursue a more data-driven approach.
In her first appointment at Quantify, Dara’s health coach recommended a thyroid panel, quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) stool analysis, and gluten sensitivity test, to evaluate thyroid function and autoimmunity, test for parasites, bacteria, fungi, and viruses, and evaluate intestinal permeability, inflammation, the health of her microbiome, and immune reactivity to gluten, a protein in wheat, barley, and rye.
Test results
Her first time conducting a comprehensive evaluation of her health, Dara’s thyroid panel showed elevated TSH, indicating hypothyroidism, or the condition of not producing enough thyroid hormones, which often causes fatigue, depression, brain fog, constipation, weight gain, and other chronic symptoms.
Despite being technically within the reference range and considered “normal,” her TSH had likely been elevated for years—a hallmark indicator of compromised thyroid function—but her doctor hadn’t flagged it, having been trained to only look for obvious abnormalities that would warrant treatment with medication.
Providing an additional clue as to what was going on, Dara’s qPCR stool analysis showed increased intestinal permeability (or, more colloquially, leaky gut), which commonly contributes to hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, and other chronic thyroid conditions.
Completing the puzzle, Dara’s gluten sensitivity test was also abnormal, indicating that while Dara didn’t have celiac disease, she did have a significant sensitivity to gluten, and that her regular consumption of foods containing gluten was likely compromising the integrity of her intestinal barrier, causing leaky gut, immune dysregulation, and, ultimately, her hypothyroidism.
Recovery
Dara was understandably frustrated that her doctor had missed her hypothyroidism, having been told for years that she was “probably just stressed.”
She had known that something was wrong—her symptoms had reminded her of that every day—so her test results not only provided the data she needed to recover her health, but also the validation she’d been searching for that her symptoms weren’t in her head.
Thrilled to finally get answers, Dara started following her health plan closely, checking in with her health coach regularly to help her stay on track.
She eliminated processed foods, sugar, and grains from her diet, increased consumption of fruits, vegetables, and fermented foods, started drinking at least 64 ounces of water per day, and took certain supplements, such as ginger, amla, and oregano oil.
Within a month, not only did her fatigue, depression, and brain fog start to improve, but she also reported feeling “less cold all the time,” an encouraging indication that her thyroid was coming back online.
Within a year, her symptoms had completely resolved, her TSH was back to normal, and a follow-up qPCR stool analysis showed no indication of leaky gut, further validating the work she had done to address an often overlooked cause of hypothyroidism.