Una Healy has opened up about an autoimmune diagnosis she was diagnosed with while touring with girl group The Saturdays.
Suffering from Hashimoto’s, a disease that causes the immune system to on the thyroid gland. Una has shared that she is on medication to manage the disease for the rest of her life, but she wants to assure fans that she is completely fine.
Speaking about getting her diagnosis a number of years ago, Una explained:
“I remember when I joined The Saturday’s first, you probably hear it a lot on my early recordings, my voice is a lot huskier, now I do have a huskier tone that comes out sometimes, like a rasp”
“Now I do have a husky tone that comes out sometimes, like a rasp. It just comes out sometimes, I can’t put it on, it actually hurts to even do that”
Getting checked out by a doctor after noticing unusual changes in her voice, she continued:
“The doctor came in to see all of us and he kind of looked around my neck, and he was like you’ve a bit of swelling around your throat there. Have you ever had your thyroid examined?”
“And I said no, so I had my blood checked to check how my thyroid levels were and it turned out I’ve an underactive thyroid, so I’m hyperthyroid”
Una says that she now takes daily medication to treat her disease, allowing her to live a completely normal and healthy life:
“I am now on thyroxine, I have to take it daily, forever. But I am totally healthy and completely normal, but that was the side effect of the early days of it”
“There are a lot of different side effects to it, and I didn’t have any of the big obvious ones apart from that my neck was slightly swelling and I can see in old pictures now where that was”
“But it is good for people to get checked,” she concluded.