Is your thyroid making you fat? Around 27 million Americans have thyroid disease — and almost half don’t know it. Thyroid disease arises when the hormone-producing gland at the base of your throat goes out of whack, triggering weight fluctuation, tiredness, and emotional ups and downs, among other symptoms.

In Natural Solutions: Vibrant Health, Balanced Living’s March issue — on newsstands now — find the latest on which tests to request, as well as a quiz to help you determine if your thyroid might be to blame for weight gain and other symptoms.

When Mary Shomon reported being exhausted, moody, and unable to lose weight, her doctor attributed the symptoms to stress. When Shomon’s symptoms didn’t improve with diet, exercise, and plenty of shut-eye, she was diagnosed with an underactive thyroid.

“I thought, ‘What’s a thyroid?’” says Shomon, now an authority on thyroid disease and author of The Thyroid Diet, who was interviewed in Natural Solutions. “I’ve talked with people who have the same symptoms I had, and their doctors have diagnosed them with everything from mental illness to laziness.”

Because thyroid problems are often overlooked, it’s important to see an endocrinologist. And because synthetic thyroid medications don’t always provide relief, Natural Solutions offers science-backed information about these integrative therapies:

* Try ayurvedic herbs. Guggul and manjistha help detoxify the thyroid. And keep your endocrine system functioning optimally with ashwagandha, rhodiola, and ginseng.

* Sweat out thyroid-disrupting heavy metals by sitting in a sauna for up to 40 minutes a few times per week. Or add 2 cups of Epsom salts and 8 ounces of baking soda to a hot bath.

* Boost iodine levels to support thyroid health: Eat kelp, and take an iodine supplement daily. And if you’re hypothyroid, avoid eating a lot of broccoli, strawberries, and spinach, which reduce thyroid-hormone production. PR Newswire

Johns Hopkins experts have found that men enrolled in an active surveillance program for prostate cancer that eventually needed surgery to remove their prostates fared just as well as men who opted to remove the gland immediately, except if a follow-up biopsy during surveillance showed high-grade cancer.

Active surveillance, or “watchful waiting,” is an option open to men whose tumors are considered small, low-grade and at low risk of being lethal. Given the potential complications of prostate surgery and likelihood that certain low-risk tumors do not require treatment, some men opt to enroll in active surveillance programs to monitor PSA levels and receive annual biopsies to detect cellular changes that signal a higher grade, more aggressive cancer for which treatment is recommended. Yet, according to the Johns Hopkins experts, there is concern that delaying surgery in this group until biopsy results worsen may result in cancers that are more lethal and difficult to cure.

Bruce Trock, Ph.D., associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Brady Urological Institute, and his colleagues compared the pathology results of men in an active surveillance group at Johns Hopkins who later had surgery with those who also had low-risk tumors and opted for immediate surgery.

Results initially showed that 116 active surveillance participants who had surgery were more likely to have high-grade, larger tumors than 348 men who had immediate surgery. But Trock says that these results were found only in 43 (37 percent) men in the surveillance group who were recommended for surgery because a follow-up biopsy during surveillance worsened to indicate a high-grade tumor.

“We think that these men had high-grade tumors to begin with that their initial biopsy missed, and this group may be over-represented in men who are recommended for treatment after an initial period of active surveillance,” says Trock. He adds that, in general, 15 to 25 percent of men whose initial biopsy shows a low-risk prostate tumor will actually have a high-grade cancer upon further review of the entire prostate once it is removed.

Apart from the 43 men whose pathology results worsened during surveillance, the remaining men in the surveillance group had similar pathology results at surgery to those in the immediate surgery group. “This means that most tumors are not likely to worsen during the period of active surveillance,” says Trock.

The researchers calculate that the risk of finding high-grade tumors in the entire group of 801 active surveillance patients is low — about 4.5 percent per year. PhysOrg

People who suffer migraines are about twice as likely as people without the painful headaches to suffer a stroke caused by a blood clot, a new research review finds.

The analysis, which combined the results of 21 previous studies, confirms a connection between migraines and ischemic stroke — the most common form of stroke, occurring when a clot disrupts blood flow to the brain.

Across the studies, migraine sufferers were about twice as likely to suffer an ischemic stroke as people without migraines, according to findings published in the American Journal of Medicine.

Experts are not sure why the relationship exists, and it is not yet known whether the migraines themselves directly lead to strokes in some people.

It’s likely, however, that a common underlying process contributes to both migraines and stroke risk, said Dr. Saman Nazarian, the senior researcher on the new study and an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.

For now, he told Reuters Health in an email, the bottom line for migraine sufferers is that they should be particularly vigilant about controlling any modifiable risk factors for stroke that they may have.

Some of those risk factors include high blood pressure, smoking and diabetes.

“The main thing I would want (people) to take away from this is that if they get migraines, they should address stroke risk factors,” Nazarian said. “They should not smoke and they should watch their blood pressure and have it treated if it is high.”

Experts also generally say that people with migraines should remember that while the headaches are linked to a relatively increased risk of stroke, the absolute risk to any one person remains fairly low.

In one recent study of 6,100 adults with migraines, for example, 2 percent reported a history of stroke, versus 1.2 percent of 5,243 adults who did not suffer from migraines.

The current findings are based on 21 international studies conducted between 1975 and 2007 and involving more than 622,000 adults with and without migraines.

Most of the studies took into account a number of factors that might help explain any connection between migraine and stroke risk — such as age, high blood pressure, diabetes, smoking habits and weight.

Even with those factors considered, migraines themselves were linked to a two-fold increase in stroke risk when Nazarian’s team combined the results of all 21 studies.

The precise cause of migraines is not fully understood, but the pain involves constriction, and then swelling, of brain blood vessels. One theory is that people with migraine may have dysfunction in the blood vessels throughout the body, which may explain the increased risk of stroke and, as some previous studies have found, heart attack.

No one yet knows whether treating and preventing migraine attacks can do anything to affect people’s risk of cardiovascular problems.

On one hand, researchers have noted, drugs that prevent migraine attacks could theoretically lower the risk of cardiovascular problems. On the other hand, certain medications might have negative effects; some anti-inflammatory painkillers have been linked to cardiovascular risks, while migraine drugs known as “ergots” tend to constrict blood vessels throughout the body.

The current study received no drug industry funding, according to Nazarian’s team, and none of the researchers reports any industry ties. msnbc