Can a Commonly Prescribed Thyroid Medication Lift Depression and Dementia?
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Could levothyroxine be the poor man's option, not just for cognitive decline but for affective disorders? Thyroid hormones have a long history of being used to elevate mood, often as supplements to conventional antidepressants. Decades later, the effects of thyroid function on the mind — whether achieved through normal physiology, a disease, or a pill — remain less than fully settled. What has changed are formal organizational guidelines for dealing with minimally elevated TSH values and advances in the technological capacity to pool large amounts of data to generate more conclusive answers. In the past year, several studies have assessed the impact of thyroid function on dementia and depression.
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@patralekha The prototype study, a randomized controlled trial called TRUST, as reported by Medscape in 2017, looked at the effect of using levothyroxine to normalize a minimally elevated TSH among a geriatric cohort of about 700 participants. The study found no symptomatic benefit, primarily on quality-of-life measures. A further subgroup analysis of participants who had assessments of depression pre- and post treatment focused more specifically on whether mild depression could be alleviated with TSH correction with levothyroxine. Use of antidepressants was not an exclusion criterion. No effect was found on depression scores, using two different scales depending on the geographic location of the participants.