Dr. Sagen Zac-Varghese

You get more hormone released, more hormone made, and the gland gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

And there's a ratcheting mechanism.

So the gland gets bigger over time.

It never goes down in size.

It gets bigger.

So if you have a whole lifetime of poor vitamin D and poor calcium, your glands will get bigger to protect us.

Exactly.

So I think of it as, so it's pulling calcium out of the bones, you get thin bones.

And you can think of the kidneys as like the washing machines of the body.

So the kidneys having to wash all this blood.

If there's too much calcium, you get lime scales, you get kidney stones.

So hyperparathyroidism...

You get kidney stones or nephrocalcinosis.

So these two things, osteoporosis and kidney stones, are complications, late complications.

They can take years to develop of having an overactive parathyroid gland.

So that's far less common.

You can have genetic conditions that cause you to not develop the parathyroid glands or gene changes that don't let you release the hormone.

But most commonly we see it after thyroidectomy.

So it's iatrogenic.

So it's because someone's had a thyroidectomy