Wow, Rick that is what I call serendipity! I'll be curious to see if he mentions any relation between PD and thyroiditis. I too plan on seeing an endocrinologist just as a follow up to our discussion and the fact that I largely started feeling like crap a few months post partum and it has worsened if anything. The symptoms point toward hypothyroidism like weight gain, fatigue, depression...yet I am having attacks very similar to what you experience which is result of hyperthyroidism. Talk about confusing!

My pregnancy and that of many other YO moms hold secrets to all this too. In fact, in researching how most women I know who have had babies while having PD and permanently worsened (me included)as a result, I ran right into all this thyroid info and when I hit parathyroid it gelled even more with PD.

One or two scarce articles even dare broach the effect of pregnancy on PD. The lone researcher in this area has suggested our PD is worsened by rapidly fluctuating hormones. Maybe this is so, but estrogen is supposed to be neuroprotective, so I could see a symptom exacerbation as our estrogen drops rather quickly after delivery, but I would then think we might return to baseline, but this is not the case. I'd say estrogen might still be a factor but something else is working against us, and I started thinking "thyroid".

About thyroid and pregnancy:

Many women develop thyroiditis post partum. It begins as hyperthyroidism and the thyroid never recovers from the inflammatory autoimmune attack (our immune system is stunted in favor of fetal develop) and we then become hypothyroid. It can disappear within a year or remain a permanent state for some women and clinically this autoimmune form is indistinguishable from Hoshimoto's Disease. Even more interesting...look at these case reports- longstanding, untreated Hashimoto's hypothyroidism can turn into neurodegenerative disease like cerebellar degeneration that looks like Ataxia, Parkinsonism, and MSA. In other words there is clear evidence that what begins as an autoimmune attack on the thyroid ends as an autoimmune attack in the person's brain. I can say that in seeing four different neurologists, not one ever asked if my thyroid had been checked.

I am not at all saying that my PD is not what it is, but I do wonder now if I developed a thyroid problem from pregnancy and untreated it has impacted the PD. I will be suggesting this to my PD mama friends; clearly it can do this. I am most definitely having all things thyroid checked very soon.

Oh, one last anecdote of interest...patients with untreated or under
treated hypothyroid report experiencing "brain fog".

Please report back after your neurology visit.

Laura