Synthroid Levothyroxine: Side effects, Interactions, and Overdose
Get our printable guide for your next healthcare provider’s appointment to help you ask the right questions. The good news is that in most cases, the side effects and consequences are not severe and should fade on their own over a period of a few days. By adding more complexity to your dosing equation (by skipping other doses) you risk causing more side effects down the road which can confound and confuse you further.
What to do if someone takes too much levothyroxine or takes it by accident
- More valuable measurements may be found by evaluating your free thyroid hormone concentrations.
- Cold intolerance is a sign that your dose of levothyroxine is not high enough.
- Levothyroxine toxicity is rare, but it can sometimes occur accidentally, especially in children.
- The thyroid is a major gland in the body that is involved in important functions such as metabolism, growth, development, and regulation of body temperature.
Also, your health care professional may be able to tell you about ways to prevent or reduce some of these side effects. Certain other medicines may also increase or decrease the effects of Synthroid. The counter effects of those concomitant drugs like propranolol and sertraline are always to be considered as a cause in a patient with thyronorm overdose for being asymptomatic. The symptoms of too much thyroid medication can mimic hyperthyroidism or hypothyroidism, so it’s important to have your TSH, T4, and/or T3 levels checked regularly and any time your medication changes. Contact your healthcare provider if you’re experiencing symptoms of too much levothyroxine.
- I don’t practice medicine anymore and instead specialize in helping people like YOU who have thyroid problems, hormone imbalances, and weight loss resistance.
- This is really helpful because the type of hair loss that you are experiencing can help you figure out the CAUSE.
- It may occur intentionally in young and older adults in an attempt to lose weight, with suicidal intentions, or for undeclared purposes.
- Tell any doctor, dentist, or surgeon who treats you that you are using Synthroid.
- It’s possible that the quality of your medication may change from one refill of your prescription to another.
- This study was conducted in accordance with ethical standard and informed written consent was taken from patient for publication of this case report.
Levothyroxine Overdose: Signs You Are Taking Too Much
It’s best not to play chemist when it comes to your medications and instead stick to your regular program as if the change in your dosing didn’t happen. You may feel jittery or anxious for about a week or so, but the side effects should fade rapidly over a few days. In reality, you may find that you need slightly more than 75mcg but less than 100mcg and you might find that your ideal dose is really closer to 88mcg per day. The good news is that overdose symptoms can be easily solved by adjusting your dose of Synthroid.
Patient resources
If more than a few hours of ingestion of LT-4 tablets have elapsed, most probably the tablets have travelled from the gastric cavity to duodenum. One way to confirm the presence of LT-4 tablets in the gastric cavity is endoscopy, easily conducted in many hospitals and emergency rooms. LT-4 tablets are dissolved by the gastric juice, but there are no data about the rate of dissolution of a large number of tablets of LT-4.
- I’ve found that these 10 foods cause the most problems for thyroid patients.
- Learn which foods you should avoid if you have thyroid disease of any type.
- Along with its needed effects, levothyroxine (the active ingredient contained in Synthroid) may cause some unwanted effects.
- Early gastric lavage, glucocorticoids, and cholestyramine are also effective options.
- The counter effects of those concomitant drugs like propranolol and sertraline are always to be considered as a cause in a patient with thyronorm overdose for being asymptomatic.
The exact opposite is true when your levothyroxine dose is not high enough. One of the first symptoms people experience when their thyroid is off is a general sense of irritability. Chronic thyroxine excess is more likely to cause clinically important thyrotoxicosis, and is particularly concerning in the elderly and those with cardio-respiratory comorbidities. Sometimes, you end up getting too much levothyroxine because of factors that are not directly related to the medication. Switching formulations of levothyroxine—for example, from tablet to gel caps or liquid—can also cause overmedication because your body absorbs some formulations of levothyroxine better than others.
There are a few reasons you could end up taking too much levothyroxine. For example, you may become overmedicated with the dosage or type of thyroid hormone replacement therapy you are taking. Certain health conditions and lifestyle changes can also make an overdose of levothyroxine more likely to happen. Although many patients with hypothyroidism use levothyroxine as an alternative treatment, few cases of acute overdosage have been reported worldwide1, and synthroid bananas a large proportion of them have involved pediatric patients. A 21-year-old woman initially presented with palpitation and chest tightness after an overdose of levothyroxine (10 mg). The patient transiently lost consciousness and developed atrial fibrillation during hospitalization.
Should You Take A Statin If You Have Hypothyroidism?
You should be aware, though, that each dose of levothyroxine will stay in your system for about 4 weeks total (4). If your dose of levothyroxine is only mildly elevated then you may only experience slightly loose stools. This tends to fade fairly rapidly, though, as blood levels of thyroid hormone fall. Even though both conditions result in hair loss, the type of hair loss is actually different. The quality, the texture, and even how it lays on your head can all be impacted by your thyroid medication dose.
Written informed consent was obtained from the patient for publication of this case report and accompanying images. A copy of the written consent is available for review by the Editor-in-Chief of this journal on request. This study was conducted in accordance with ethical standard and informed written consent was taken from patient for publication of this case report.
The mean daily thyroxine dose was 1.99 mcg/kg (range, 0.3 to 6.6 mcg/kg) with a mean duration of therapy of 20.4 years (range, less than 1 to 68 years). Women taking daily doses of 1.6 mcg/kg or more had significantly lower bone mineral density levels at the ultradistal radius, midshaft radius, hip, and lumbar spine compared to controls. However, estrogen use appeared to negate the adverse effects of thyroid hormone on bone mineral density. A 34 year-old female with a past medical history of Hashimoto thyroiditis (currently taking thyroxine 200 mcg daily) who took an overdose 6 hours ago. The patient claims to have taken 60 x 200 mcg of thyroxine and 10 x 10 mg of temazepam. The patient currently has ‘normal’ vital signs (GCS of 15) and is feeling tired but is otherwise asymptomatic.
If you take an excessively high dose you may be tempted to compensate by reducing your dose the next few days, but this isn’t actually a good idea. This can be teased out as you evaluate your lab tests and as you follow your symptoms. The most obvious answer is to reduce your dose back to where you felt “normal” which would be around 75mcg of Synthroid each day. I don’t recommend that you make any changes to your Synthroid dose without first consulting your doctor, but the answer to solving your issue is usually as easy as reducing your total dose. More valuable measurements may be found by evaluating your free thyroid hormone concentrations. Using a consistently high dose of Synthroid puts you at an increased risk for developing osteoporosis (3) (decreased bone density) and heart conditions such as atrial fibrillation (4).
