Ladies, Hashimoto's can skew iron tests. You might actually be deficient!

Estimates are about 30% of American women are iron deficient, and that percentage is higher for those of us with autoimmune disorders.

My main symptom for the last decade has been fatigue. Also hair loss, thin brittle nails, exercise intolerance, running out of breath on the stairs even though I'm in decent shape. For years I'd get your usual blood panel and they would test my iron, which has always been in the normal range. I did have one doctor test my ferritin, which is usually around 40, which is also ostensibly in the normal range. However, I recently learned that inflammation from Hashimoto's can skew your iron results upward And falsely make you look like you have enough iron when you are actually deficient.

Symptoms of iron deficiency include fatigue, headaches, shortness of breath, dizziness, brittle nails, cold hands and feet, and heart palpitations, amongst others. There's some good overlap with Hashimoto's symptoms, confusing the issue.

None of my doctors caught this. I picked it up from my own research. And when I started supplementing Iron a month ago, I started to feel better. This morning, I lost about a third as much hair in the shower as usual. I need naps much less often. And it takes months to rebuild your iron stores, so I'm expecting further improvement in the future.

So get your serum iron and hemoglobin tested, but also your ferritin and your TIBC. Take Your iron result, divide by TIBC number, multiply by 100 to get your TSAT, or iron saturation. You're shooting for a ferritin of 80 to 100 and a TSAT over 30.

But more importantly, if you have any of the symptoms of iron deficiency, try taking a modest amount of iron supplement every other day, and see how you feel in a few weeks. If you feel better, then it doesn't matter what the numbers say, you needed iron.

Iron supplementation is a longer conversation, but the upshot is you take the supplement every other day to increase absorption, and you have to take most types of iron supplement with vitamin C for your body to process it properly. If you're getting a lot of gastrointestinal symptoms and / or you feel like you're coming down with the flu, take a smaller amount.