richvank: that's all very interesting. Thanks for posting it. I am going to try to remember to look into the Vitamin Diagnostics testing when they get their website back online.
About the glutathione ideas, hasn't Cheney somewhat abandoned those? Are people still seeing improvements with taking whey and other glutathione precursors?
Hi, Mr. Kite.
You're welcome, and I'm glad you found it interesting.
I just posted an update on the Vitamin Diagnostics thread.
On glutathione and Dr. Cheney, that's an interesting situation. Here's the story: In 1999, Dr. Cheney gave a couple of public talks (in Austria and in Texas) in which he reported that essentially all his CFS patients had glutathione depletion, and that he was trying various approaches to building it up, including whey protein. That is what got me interested in glutathione, and I studied it quite a bit and became convinced that glutathione depletion is behind many of the features of CFS. I also encouraged PWCs to try to build up their glutathione in various ways. Over the course of time I found that while these measures did help many PWCs (while some could not tolerate them), the benefits were temporary. I began to believe that there was a vicious circle operating that was holding glutathione down in PWCs. I presented a poster paper stating this at the 2004 AACFS conference. Shortly after this, Jill James and colleagues published their work in autism, which showed that glutathione was also depleted in that disorder, and that it was associated with a problem in the methylation cycle, which lies upstream of glutathione in the sulfur metabolism. When I read this, I immediately suspected that the same thing must be true in CFS, and I began encouraging PWCs to try the treatments that had helped the methylation cycle in autism. This turned out to be true, and these types of treatments have been able to restore glutathione without directly supplementing it or its precursors. I've written additional papers about this, which you can read at
www.cfsresearch.org by clicking on CFS/M.E. and then on my name.
Meanwhile, Dr. Cheney also found that boosting glutathione directly was not all he had hoped it would be. In addition, I think he ran some lab tests that were unfortunately misinterpreted, and he began to believe that the problem with glutathione in CFS was not that it was depleted, but that it was oxidized. He then reasoned that building glutathione directly would simply raise the level of oxidized glutathione, which would not be beneficial. So he abandoned glutathione boosting. Meanwhile, he had his heart failure and transplant, and he became very interested in the heart in CFS. He got an echocardiograph machine, and focused his diagnosis on using it. He also moved more into using cell signalling factors from animals, and then eventually into incorporating stem cell treatments, which he is focussing on now, and it's looking very good at this point.
So he and I differ with regard to glutathione at this point. I think that we have good evidence that glutathione depletion and the partial methylation cycle block are at the root of CFS, and that they are the cause of the mito dysfunction, which in turn causes the diastolic dysfunction of the heart that he observes by echocardiography. I think his current view is that the mito dysfunction is caused by oxidative stress, which is brought about perhaps by a virus inhibiting the antioxidant enzymes. We continue to have constructive dialogue, and perhaps eventually our views will converge again. In any case, I owe a lot to Dr. Cheney for stimulation of my thinking, and I continue to root for his stem cell therapy patients.
If you go to the site I mentioned above, you can read about the Simplified Treatment Approach for CFS, which is based on the hypothesis I've adopted from the autism people, and which has been very helpful for many PWCs.
Best regards,
Rich