Can Hashimoto’s cause a positive ANA? - Dr. Martin Rutherford

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Can Hashimoto’s cause a positive ANA. This is like, I think one of the most important topics of this whole auto-immune as well as a Hashimoto's topic. This one drives me crazy. So ANA. ANA is a widely accepted test. Most people who do auto-immune testing today, medical doctors, rheumatologists, will run an ANA when they suspect you have autoimmunity. And an ANA means anti-A, anti, nuclear antibody. These are antibodies. So what antibodies are, when there's a bad guy in your system, antibodies don't destroy them, antibodies tag them for destruction. An antibody doesn't destroy, they just tag so that the immune system knows to come out and do the destruction. It's considered a pretty general auto immune marker. Hashimoto's is an auto immune disease, so indeed, if you have Hashimoto's ... Well, let me step back.

Let me step back. Anti nuclear antibody, what does that mean? It means that you are getting antibodies against the nucleus of a cell. All of our cells have nuclei, right? Nucleus. Which cell? We don't know. It could be against any cell in your body. Any cell, which includes you're going to have an anti nuclear antibodies with rheumatoid arthritis, Sjogren's, lupus, those are the most common ones. Certainly, you can have it with a Hashimoto's and any one of ... They now are up to like 140 potential autoimmune responses in the body that they know of. But here's the killer about the ANA and this may be what generated question. I don't know. Almost everybody comes into me goes, "They don't know whether I have autoimmunity or not." And I already know what that means before they even get the words out right. It means they ran an ANA and one day they ran it and it was positive and they said, "Oh, it looks like you might have autoimmunity but it doesn't mean anything, because the next day we might run it and it might mean nothing because it might not come up positive."

Not being an autoimmunologist, but seeing a zillion of these things, it's pretty well understood that some days antibodies are more available, you have more of them flying around than other days. Some days the ANA will be up, some days the ANA will be down, confusing your doctor, but it shouldn't be confusing. At any given time, if you have an immune attack against your thyroid or against any tissue, antibodies are going to be up and it's going to come up positive. You have autoimmunity. Autoimmunity doesn't go away. I've had doctors criticized me for this indirectly to their patients and I said, "Well, why don't you just go back to your doctor and ask him why did you run the damn test in the first place? If the test came up positive, why are you telling me I don't have anything?"

The mindblower is, this test actually means you can have antibodies against any cell in your body. It's actually a very good test if you just learn how to use it. Absolutely. And I just wanted to like go over all that because I'm going over with you the things that I see as a longtime functional medicine practitioner, probably first one in the group of doctors that was in the pool for a Hashimoto's years and I've got Hashimoto's.

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Martin P. Rutherford, DC

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