by Rebecca Brown

Created on: May 06, 2009

Children can, and do, get hypothyroidism. Hypothyroidism, or myxoedema (myxedema to US readers), is a condition which means you do not have enough of the thyroxine hormone in your bloodstream. This is apparently twice as common in girls as in boys, although so far no-one seems able to say why.

I am unable to give any medical or scientific details, as I am not a medical expert. However, I can provide information that is only available to every one in three thousand people - personal experience! Please note that any healthcare-related information in the following article is relevant to the UK.

I am currently 28 years old and have congenital hypothyroidism, that is, I have had it since birth. This is a rare condition and affects one in 3000-4000 babies in North America, Europe, Australia and Japan.

To give a brief background, I am my parents' second child, my brother being born eighteen months before me with Downs' Syndrome. When I was born, I was very listless, floppy, jaundiced and not very responsive. I was born before the heel-prick test for newborns was introduced into the UK (1981), and as far as the health professionals were concerned, my mother was simply being paranoid when she insisted that something was wrong with me. I will point out here that my mum had at that time several years of senior nursing experience, and was drawing on that as well her own instinct. It took, as far as am I aware, several forceful discussions with the doctor to get me tested, and lo and behold, myxoedema was diagnosed. I was immediately started with thyroxine and my parents will assert that the difference was miraculous. Their favourite anecdote about me is that before treatment I was like a sluggish maggot, and afterwards I turned into a real baby. Thank you for that, Mum and Dad.

Having grown out of my maggot phase, I am happy to tell any concerned parents reading this that hypothyroidism has had very little impact on my life as long as I take my thyroxine. This, if you are interested, is a fairly high dose of 250 micrograms daily, which I believe is higher than the average dose for someone of my age who has developed hypothyroidism as an adult.

Growing up, it was normal to take tablets every night, and on my growth charts I always kept fairly strictly to the fiftieth percentile line. I have frequently been compared by my mother to the bionic child, since they were able to adjust my rate of growth by adjusting my dosage. At least this is an improvement on the maggot

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