Thyroid-A Key to Fertility

Hormones: Keys to Fertility and Conception

Knowing your hormone status prior to trying to conceive, takes a lot of the guess work out of what’s going to happen  along your new journey.

When trying to get pregnant, it’s helpful to know when you’re fertile and the quality of your egg which can both determined by tracking your temperature during the follicular stage. You also need to know if your uterus produces enough progesterone to sustain a pregnancy.

While the hormones we usually associate with fertility and pregnancy-estrogen, FSH, LH and progesterone in women and testosterone in men are important, the hormones that drive these, are our thyroid hormones. They are the key players and thorough testing is necessary but unfortunately, often overlooked.

Adequate thyroid hormones are needed to produce progesterone for egg implantation and to sustain the pregnancy. Low thyroid levels can reduce estrogen (needed to grow your uterine lining and stimulate ovulation).

For the menfolk, adequate thyroid levels are needed for the production of testosterone.

So it is a must to have a COMPLETE thyroid panel done. Not only is it necessary to make sure your thyroid levels are adequate to get pregnant, it’s extremely important to monitor your thyroid throughout your pregnancy but particularly during the 1st three months of pregnancy to prevent miscarriage, to ensure adequate brain development of baby and to prevent birth defects-kind of important!

Once you’re pregnant, you begin to share your thyroid hormones with baby. There’s a 30-50% increased demand and your supply can become depleted rapidly. So monitoring your levels closely and frequently is important.

A complete thyroid panel includes: TSH, Free T4 Free T3, reverse T3, TG antibodies, and TPO antibodies.

One of the best ways to support your thyroid no matter how well it’s working, is to lower your stress levels. Cortisol (your stress hormone) lowers the level of the active form of thyroid hormone, T3. So if you’re stressing out, that, all by itself, can make becoming pregnant difficult.

Monitoring your thyroid hormones and helping you manage stress is all part of the care that ALB gives to their Preconception and Prenatal clients.

Click here to find out how we can support you.

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