Okay, here’s how I understand it.
Hyper/hypothyroid conditions, just plain vanilla imbalances, can run in families.
Autoimmune diseases are hereditary as a GROUP, meaning that if someone in the family has an autoimmune disease, everyone is at risk for developing some type of autoimmune disease, though not everyone may get one, and everyone may end up with different autoimmune diseases. In my family, I had a great-aunt with Rheumatoid Arthritis, an uncle with Graves’ (both of these on my Dad’s side), and my Mom had some kind of thyroid condition (recurrent imbalances, both directions, with no specific cause determined throughout her life). Perhaps I was destined to be here eventually. Still, my two full siblings have no autoimmune diseases OR thyroid imbalance, so the disease is obviously not a given.
A third point to make is that, once you’ve been diagnosed with one autoimmune disease, the likelihood of being diagnosed with another slightly increases.
That’s all I know of the connections. Still, it’s important to know these things when you’re giving a doctor your medical history. I knew about my great-aunt’s RA, but never knew my uncle had Graves’ (and RAI) until after my diagnosis and treatment. It might have been nice to get that information earlier in my life, because I feel that Graves’ was TRYING to present itself much earlier in my life. Maybe if I’d known, I could’ve avoided a little bit of the time “in between,” when I was ill but didn’t know what was going on, and the doctor had not yet gone so far as to test my thyroid. That was a few months for me, but for some it goes on for YEARS while doctors stubbornly refuse to test for thyroid imbalance. Knowing the family history would likely make the test a routine annual event and diagnosis could come much quicker.
~Ski
NGDF Assistant Online Facilitator
