Levothyrox - latest

The last thing noted… is the large number of users who have moved over to other medications rather than continue with the new form of the drug…

An an enormous number of people worried about this. My view was it’s a (big) storm in a teacup. The active ingredient didn’t change and the dose was the same so the symptoms reported seemed unlikely and/or hard to measure. Now a new study appears backs up that view. Problem with the thyroid (or thyroxine) is that it effects so many other bits and tuning the drug levels takes so long. My late wife had her throid zapped by a russian endocrinologist with radio iodine in Jo’burg in '95 and had no problems subsequently. My own was whipped out in 2017 and I’ve been on Levothyrox ever since. The upside is this artcle also tells me a I’ve a new club to join, l’Association française des malades de la thyroïde (AFMT).

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Are you really dismissing all the people who had symptoms,including tumours returning? I had several new symptoms after the change of formu la and I didn’t realize what was going on until I read about it on here I changed to the German version and all my symptoms disappeared.

I remember when the formula changed the advice was to get your TSH levels checked. Why would that be the advice if the active ingredient had remained exactly the same?

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I think this article explains well why TSH levels might have fluctuated Mandy… https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/09/france-brings-back-phased-out-drug-after-patients-rebel-against-its-replacement and it seems it may be due to the new formulation being somewhat better than the old.

“If lactose reduced the hormone’s effective concentration in the old formulation, many patients likely received less hormone than assumed; a new, more stable, formulation may have generated a small wave of hyperthyroidism”

I actually don’t think the new formulation caused many people problems, certainly not tumours returning, unless is was somehow related to that fluation. But that’s only my opinion. Undoubtably it was a communications and PR disaster.

Hundreds of thousands of people experienced real symptoms. It is in no way a storm in a tea cup just because it didn’t affect you. I remember people interviewed on TV reporting horrendous symptoms and, yes, the return of cancers. See link below.

I was affected as well. I had a range of bizarre symptoms that, fortunately, were annoying rather than serious but unpleasant enough to research a solution. I hadn’t connected the change in medication at all until I read about it on here. Eventually my symptoms were sufficiently unpleasant that I stopped taking the medication all together while waiting for the alternative to become available.

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I didn’t come to my conclusion because “it didn’t affect” me Mandy. I came to my conclusion, which I still hold, based on what I read. Discarding, of course, any anecdotal stuff. It appears the latest technical findings don’t back up the hysteria. If other reports produce evidence of cause and effect then I’ll change my view :slight_smile:

I suffered a mild heart attack from this medication. I have hypothyroidism and part of my thyroid was removed. As of right now, the US doctors are at a loss as to what to give me. So now im 8 months with no medication to help my condition.