According to a recent survey by the University of Colorado, “Investigators have found the prevalence of mild thyroid failure to be approximately 10% in the general population and up to 20% in older women.”
Doctors on the thyroid service at the Harvard Medical School agree that the incidence of the disorder is one woman out of every twelve under age fifty. By age sixty it is one woman out of every six.
It is common knowledge that one-fifth of the U.S. population is overweight, and countless others suffer from a variety of eating disorders that could well be connected to thyroid problems. Millions of people are depressed and many are taking antidepressant medication.
(For many years, Prozac has been the number one best selling prescription drug.) Millions of adults suffer from low energy, while we are faced with an epidemic of attention deficit disorder and hyperactive children. Little attention has been given to the mechanism of these maladies. We believe—and many other researchers concur that much of it can be related to abnormal thyroid function.
Other experts estimate that at any given time, more than half of those with low-grade hypothyroidism remain undiagnosed. This means that an enormous number of people might have a story similar to Karilee’s or Alma’s. In 1999, Synthroid, the medicine most commonly prescribed for low thyroid, became the number one best-selling prescription drug. Thus, we are clearly dealing with a large-scale epidemic that has been inadequately addressed.