Weight gain & fatigue:chemo induced hypothyroidism?

[heblaj01]

In this extract of a longer text, the possibility is raised that chemo might affect the thyroid & as a result cause weight gain. So monitoring the condition of the thyroid with blood tests for TSH, T3 & T4 may be usefull.

http://www.mamm.com/late_breaking_news.php?

Is Your Weight Gain Due to Hypothyroidism?

Women with cancer who are inexplicably overweight, depressed and so exhausted they can't get out of bed should have their thyroids checked.

The thyroid gland, a bow tie–shaped gland in the neck that absorbs iodine and converts it to hormones controlling metabolism, can become underactive, leading to a disorder called hypothyroidism. The condition is associated with weight gain, depression and fatigue. According to Nagi Kumar, Ph.D., director of nutrition research at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute in Florida, it's possible that patients who get breast cancer are at greater risk for thyroid disease.

Kumar, who works with all kinds of chemotherapy patients, began to notice that although her lung, head and neck cancer patients consistently lost weight, her breast cancer patients actually gained weight. Were women with breast cancer so depressed that they wolfed down comfort foods despite the nausea caused by chemo, Kumar wondered, or was something else going on?

To investigate further, Kumar recruited breast cancer patients she could follow from diagnosis and found that 25 percent had preexisting thyroid disease (compared to 4 to 10 percent in the population at large). In addition, 22 percent of patients gained more than five pounds within six months of diagnosis, with an average weight gain of 7 pounds. "The condition appears to be progressive, even after treatment," says Kumar, who presented the study last December at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Kumar suggests that if thyroid disease was developing but not diagnosed before breast cancer, perhaps the toxic assault of chemo made it worse. Yet attempts at intervention, including low-dose therapy with hypothyroid medication, must wait. "Drugs for hypothyroidism may also stimulate tumors," says Kumar, and before taking that risk, researchers must conduct a double-blinded trial of any treatment they have in mind.