English actress Daisy Ridley, who rose to prominence as Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2015, shared her diagnosis of Graves’ disease on Tuesday in a profile in Women’s Health. She opened up about living with this autoimmune disorder, which she was diagnosed with in September 2023.
Ridley started experiencing symptoms after she filmed the psychological thriller Magpie. Dealing with a racing heart rate, weight loss, fatigue, hand tremors, and irritability, she initially believed these were all side effects of closing out a stressful role.
What is Graves’ Disease?
Graves’ disease affects the thyroid, a small endocrine gland located in the front of your neck, which controls hormones involved in metabolizing food into energy, regulating body temperature, and moderating heart rate.
This disorder causes your body’s immune system to attack healthy thyroid tissue for reasons experts still don’t understand. A thyroid affected by Graves’ disease produces too much of the two main thyroid hormones, triiodothyronine T3) and thyroxine (T4), creating a condition called hyperthyroidism. Symptoms include an enlarged thyroid, irritability, shaky hands, eye problems like bulging and puffiness, and rarely skin problems. About 1 percent of people in the United States have it.
Treatments for this chronic condition include antithyroid medications that block production of the thyroid hormones. Beta-blockers, which help manage abnormal heart rates, can protect your heart and quell symptoms, too. Another treatment called radioiodine therapy involves taking a pill or liquid dose of radioactive iodine. The radiation targets and destroys thyroid cells over three months, shrinking the gland and reducing hormones. A 2013 review published in Nature Reviews Endocrinology found that patients who chose radioiodine therapy must then contend with low thyroid hormone, or hypothyroidism, for the rest of their lives.
Graves’ disease is more common in women than men, as are autoimmune disorders in general. One 2020 paper in the journal Evolutionary Applications found that women have 4 times the risk of men for this sort of condition. A 2024 paper in the journal Cell attributes this in part to a natural cellular process called X-chromosome inactivation, in which fledgling female mammalian cells shut down activity in one of its two X chromosomes to avoid lethal overproduction of X-chromosome-created proteins.
Thanks to medication and diet changes, Ridley is navigating her new normal and realizing just how much of a toll it took on her. “I didn’t realize how bad I felt before. Then I looked back and thought, How did I do that?” she told Women’s Health.
