Are there gender differences in response to thyroid hormones?
Thyroid hormones have been used to treat depression in two methods. Antidepressants can take 2 weeks to function at full capacity. In original studies, T3 was used to accelerate antidepressant response. Studies showed that T3 used at the beginning of treatment with TCAs could reduce that delay in treatment onset for women but not for men. In addition, a recent meta-analysis showed that there was a significant difference between T3 and placebo in accelerating treatment response, although most included studies were conducted 20–30 years ago.4 In the second method, thyroid hormone is given to a patient who has failed to show a response to antidepressants after 5–8 weeks. In these cases, antidepressant augmentation shows no gender difference in treatment response.
