Is A Hormone Imbalance Causing Your High Cholesterol?

Many people come into my office with elevated cholesterol or just elevated LDLs and they swear up and down that they eat a healthy diet and very little animal products but can’t get their lipid numbers under control. They have usually been told to change their diet or they will need a statin drug. Well, maybe but probably not.

The next question I ask is “How is your energy level?” They almost always tell me how tired they are. If someone has chronically low thyroid hormone, especially if it has not been diagnosed because their TSH was within a laboratory normal range, they may have a hormonal cause of their cholesterol issues. Just because a TSH value is in a normal range, indicated on a laboratory report, does not mean it’s optimal for that person. Sub-clinical hypothyroidism may be the cause. It is well known that low thyroid hormone can cause an elevation in triglycerides, LDLs (bad cholesterol) and often a decrease in our HDL (good cholesterol).

If your cholesterol numbers are consistently off, you may want to ask your doctor to check your full range of thyroid hormones, not just your TSH. If your numbers are low or low-normal, it may be affecting how the liver produces and processes your lipids. I see, quite often, that once we can get the thyroid hormone optimized, the lipid levels will take care of themselves without intervention with a statin. The liver processing improves, as well as the patient’s energy, so that they often can begin to do more exercise which is also known to improve cholesterol levels.

It’s good to remember that organs in your body are not working alone but are affected by many other processes. We often need to take a step back and look at other systems and processes in order to find the correct areas that require balance.
Namasté,
Dr. A