The Short Answer

When you have an autoimmune condition, brain health should be part of your treatment plan. Low thyroid hormones and chronic immune inflammation can damage brain function, leading to brain fog, memory loss, and cognitive decline. Managing both your immune system and thyroid health helps protect your brain from inflammation and premature aging.

How autoimmune conditions affect brain health and function

When addressing autoimmune conditions, including Hashimoto’s low thyroid, it’s important to include care for your brain health and function. Autoimmune diseases can profoundly affect the brain, and you may need to include brain support alongside immune system care.

Every cell needs thyroid hormones to function properly; as a result, low thyroid hormone levels can worsen brain health. Also, the inflammation of autoimmune disease, if you’re not managing your immune health, can inflame and rapidly age the brain.

Your brain depends on sufficient thyroid hormones to keep brain inflammation in check, support communication between neurons (plasticity), and produce brain chemicals (neurotransmitters).

This is why many people with unmanaged autoimmune thyroid disease have depression, fatigue, brain fog, memory loss, worsened cognition, and other brain symptoms.

Why thyroid hormones protect against brain inflammation

One of the most important roles of thyroid hormones is to dampen brain inflammation. Thyroid hormones affect the brain’s immune cells, called microglia cells. Unlike the body, the brain does not turn off inflammation when it’s no longer needed. It depends in part on good hormone function, including that of the thyroid, to prevent runaway inflammation.

Unchecked inflammation ages and degenerates the brain too quickly.

Many people with autoimmune conditions still need to take thyroid hormone medication, but you must still address the autoimmune component by eliminating inflammatory triggers, dampening inflammation, and balancing the immune system as much as possible.

Managing the immune system reduces the risk of multiple autoimmune diseases

One important reason why immune management matters is to lower the risk of developing autoimmunity elsewhere in the body, such as the brain. One autoimmune disease often begets another, and many people have more than one autoimmune disease simultaneously.

In fact, a number of people with Hashimoto’s low thyroid also have brain autoimmunity in the cerebellum, an area that plays a role in movement and coordination.

If you have an autoimmune condition and also experience balance problems, dizziness, or nausea, you may want to be screened for brain autoimmunity.

Autoimmune encephalopathy: When autoimmunity targets the brain

A worst-case scenario is autoimmune encephalopathy (also called autoimmune dementia). In people with Hashimoto’s low thyroid, this occurs when immune antibodies, thyroid peroxidase (TPO) antibodies, that destroy thyroid tissue, also attack the brain. In addition to memory loss, symptoms can include tremors, seizures, impaired speech, confusion, partial paralysis, fine motor problems, and poor coordination. However, this condition is not common, and you should not assume you have it.

This information about autoimmunity and the brain is important because many doctors tell patients to wait until their thyroid burns out before addressing it surgically. Meanwhile, their overzealous immune system continues unchecked, causing autoimmune attacks against the thyroid and possibly elsewhere, including the brain.

Why functional medicine addresses both brain and immune health

If you have been diagnosed with an autoimmune condition affecting the thyroid, functional medicine can help you recover and optimize your brain health. At RedRiver, we approach autoimmune thyroid disease by managing inflammation, supporting thyroid function, and protecting neurological health as integrated parts of the same treatment plan.