Misdiagnosing Anemia

The symptoms of anemia can often be misdiagnosed as several other conditions. Fatigue, dizziness, and hair loss – though symptoms of anemia – are also common in several other conditions, such as thyroid imbalance or

Dr. Hayden and Dr. Horsley will help to clear up some of the questions that you may have concerning anemia as they continue their series, “Understanding Anemia – Overcoming Fatigue, Bruising, and Other Symptoms”. You will learn about what anemia is, what the symptoms are, how it is diagnosed, what the best treatment options are, and what it is commonly misdiagnosed as. These videos will be released over the next couple days on our youtube account, facebook account, and as a blog post on The Hayden Institute website.

Transcript From Video on Misdiagnosing Anemia:

Dr Hayden: Thank you everyone for watching our mini-series on anemia. So far, regarding anemia, we’ve discussed what anemia is, what are some of the common symptoms regarding anemia, how you diagnose it through simple blood tests, and what are some of the treatment options for a couple of different types of anemia. The big question I want to know now is how do we misdiagnose anemia?What does anemia look like on paper and how it slips through the cracks, and how people just suffer the whole time and never get told they’re anemic?

Dr. Horsley: One of the biggest potentials for misdiagnosis is thyroid imbalance or hypothyroidism. Some of the main symptoms of thyroid imbalance are going to be crazy levels of fatigue, as well as hair loss, and dizziness (which were the symptoms we mentioned with anemia), but with thyroid imbalance they are often also gonna have cold intolerance and weight gain. So a lot of these things that are commonly associated with thyroid issues can also be the same as in anemia. So that’s the key thing a lot of doctors may miss because of what they see on a daily basis – they may be like oh nope that’s a walking talking thyroid- we’re gonna give them thyroid hormones. The problem is without proper diagnosis, it could actually could be something that ‘s completely different. So thyroid imbalances are very commonly misdiagnosed as anemia or vice versa.

Dr. Hayden: One of the other common misdiagnoses when it comes to anemia is blood sugar dysregulation. Often when we think about blood sugar imbalances, we think diabetes, and so we run blood tests and we see the fasting blood sugar is in normal range, or close enough to normal to where we don’t think diabetes. At this point most doctors would immediately rule out blood sugar imbalance and go on looking for other things. But when we talk about reactive hypoglycemic tendencies what we mean is that in that situation your blood sugar goes up and then crashes too quickly and it has this rollercoaster effect that leads to fatigue, weight gain, hair loss, intolerance to cold- all those symptoms you just mentioned a second ago with thyroid and anemic problems. So therefore, when we have someone who presents with fatigue with bruising easily with hair loss and whatever it might be, it would be in our best interest, and in the patients best interest, to make sure that we identify that this is really a thyroid problem, an anemia problem, or a blood sugar handling problem. So we run the blood tests that look for blood sugar mismanagement, thyroid imbalance, and anemic tendencies to make sure we can identify the correct problem at the correct time and provide the appropriate treatment or recommendation for treatment as necessary.

Dr. Hayden: Thank y’all for watching our little series on anemia we appreciate your time. Hopefully you learned a little bit about what anemia is, how you can identify it in your own life, what diagnostic tests are necessary, how you might be able to address it wit ha competent healthcare provider that looks at nutritional interventions and how you can make sure to not misdiagnose anemia by looking in the thyroid and blood sugar imbalance possibilities as well. Thank you all for watching and have a great day!

Be sure to check out our other posts related to anemia:

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