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  4. Do you diagnose or treat hypopituitarism, secondary, not primary? If so, what lab markers would you find most valuable, supplements? I’m speculating seeing it in patients with long-term chronic illness and inflammation.

Do you diagnose or treat hypopituitarism, secondary, not primary? If so, what lab markers would you find most valuable, supplements? I’m speculating seeing it in patients with long-term chronic illness and inflammation.

Chris Kresser: Yes. There’s not a time I’ve written about this, but I did find some papers awhile back when I’m looking into this myself. It suggests that some relatively high percentage of people with Hashimoto’s also have autoimmune hypopituitarism and that might be the fundamental issue for them. It makes sense because we know that if you have one autoimmune process that’s affecting one group of tissues, you’re more likely to have another that’s affecting another group of tissues. In that situation, what you would expect to see is slightly low pituitary hormones across the board. You can look at TSH, FSH, LH, and GH, and if they’re all a little bit low, lower than they should be or what you expect, then that can be one time that this is happening. In that situation, you would just treat it as an autoimmune condition, so all things that we’re going to talk about on course and what we’ve already talked about. You might also then consider things like low-dose naltrexone, high-dose turmeric, glutathione, optimizing vitamin D, etc.

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