Freddd
Senior Member
- Messages
- 5,184
- Location
- Salt Lake City
Hi, Starcycle.
GD-MCB stands for "Glutathione Depletion-Methylation Cycle Block." It's a hypothesis that I first presented as a poster paper at the 2007 IACFS/ME conference. I suggested a treatment protocol based on it shortly after that conference (extracted from Dr. Amy Yasko's treatment for autism), and have since cooperated with Dr. Neil Nathan to conduct a clinical study of this treatment, which was reported at the conference earlier this year. You can find all my papers in the files section of the Yahoo cfs_yasko group's website. Quite a few are also on Cort's website.
Basically, the treatment emphasizes stimulating the enzyme methionine synthase in the methylation cycle, which is partially blocked in nearly all PWCs. This is upstream in the sulfur metabolism from glutathione synthesis, and we have found (just as was first found in autism by Jill James et al.) that when the methylation cycle is restored, glutathione comes back up automatically. This treatment does use hydroxocobalamin, which the cells are able to convert to the active coenzyme forms, so long as a person has normal B12 processing enzymes.
freddd, with whom you are communicating, uses a somewhat different approach that is applicable to a wider variety of disorders than CFS alone, including people who do not have normal B12 processing enzymes. He uses higher dosages and uses the coenzyme forms of B12, rather than hydroxocobalamin. But for people with CFS, it addresses the methylation cycle block, also. freddd's protocol reportedly has been developed by laborious trial and error. The protocol I have suggested is based to a larger degree on trying to understand the biochemical pathways that are operating abnormally in CFS, and addressing specifically what appear to be the root issues. It is interesting that the two approaches have led to treatments that have a great deal in common, though there are also differences, which we have been kicking around.
Best regards,
Rich
Hi Rich,
freddd's protocol reportedly has been developed by laborious trial and error
There was a lot of targetted trial and only small amounts of error. I did a lot of reading before adding anything new and had good reason for trying each addtional thing. The glutathione precursors were the only real error in six years. Except that not all brands are equal, not all injection solution preparations are the same, even from the same compounding pharmacy. I don't know of any theory that would weed them out in advance or even expect them. There was a lot of debugging; finding why "X" didn't work and correcting it until it did work. That was laborious. Systematic testing of injections from 1mg to 25mg until finding the shape of the response curve, the color of urine, correspondence with sublingual doses, responses and urine color. A new one now is to correlate the dropoff of effectiveness to minutes of light expsosure at a certain intensity. As some have said disparangingly, "That's just engineering". However, the "just engineering" is why the system works quite predictably and reliably. If software was devoloped the way medications typically are we would have software that worked "a statistically significant percentage of the time for a statistically significant percentage of the people. The IRS would love it when you explained that you are one of the 33% for whom accounting software doesn't work. And being in the 1/3 in which it doesn't work aall is the pits.