Mitochondria in mental illness

[lansbergen]

The point here is that there are definite thresholds for diagnostic criteria. Pathological processes can start long before they reach clinical diagnostic thresholds. Ignoring this, and assuming a person is healthy until they pass some clinical threshold, can not only cause you to overlook real chronic disease, it can also cause you to reverse cause and effect. When this happens don't be surprised if research goes nowhere for decades.

Declared healthy till the point of no return is reached.

 

[caledonia]

Over the years, I've learned that in one particular study, various kinds of nutritional interventions allowed 90% of institutionalized schizophrenics to live independently on their own. My partner (a therapist) recently started working with a client who is schizophrenic. Turns out the "trigger" for his first schizophrenic episode was fasting (another hint at nutritional aspects). Without going into detail, I've also learned there's a variety of evidence indicating a pathogenic element to it as well, and a lot of evidence indicating gut issues are also a huge factor.

Gut issues, nutritional status, immune system dysfunction, mitochondrial dysfunction, etc., all seem to be important and significant factors in most if not all brain/neurological disorders, including ME/CFS. I've come to believe unaddressed (and significant) structural issues of many different kinds in the spine and skull also play important roles. I rarely think these days in terms of "mental illness". I think more in terms of Central Nervous System dysfunction, and all the many elements that combine to create such difficult health conditions.

Mental illness = methylation problems.
http://metabolichealing.com/michael-s-blog/mental-illness-or-methylation-mutation/
Methylation is required to make neurotransmitters. Therefore, mental illness is actually physical illness.
Also, as we ME patients know firsthand, methylation problems create problems with the mitos. If mito function is associated with mental illness, you can see how it's all interrelated.

There are about 30 diseases associated with methylation problems (both physical and mental), including autism, cancer, Alzheimer's, ME/CFS, anxiety, depression, etc. Treatment for all of these would be more or less the same, i.e. methylation treatment. The same core problem expresses as different diseases in different people due to genetic variations and probably environmental ones too.

However, medically and politically we don't want to be associated with mental illness due to the stigma and poor treatment options currently available.

When the world at large catches on to methylation, the stigma of mental illness will be erased, and there will be a lot less chronic illness.

 

[anciendaze]

Just to get back to the original topic, here is a link to a coming paper on metabolic features of the cell danger response.

Many aspects of cellular signalling are very hard to interpret in terms of published data. We know this signalling works in a noisy environment, under an enormous range of conditions. What we do not know is any natural way the levels can be calibrated, as our laboratory tests are, or how they are encoded to get through biochemical noise. If cells are using differential signalling, missing the other parts of the signal can leave us with nonsense. It would be easy if one signal went down every time another went up, as in systems humans design. Unfortunately, natural systems seldom operate this simply. Levels which indicate how much "biochemical noise" to remove are very likely to have been ignored, or at the very least, left unpublished.

There is an exception to this unsatisfactory state of affairs in the case of energy. Response to a pathological process must allow supply of molecules which provide energy to power that response. This may be the signal which confirms earlier biochemical signals. It may also be the tag that marks unwanted molecules for degradation, as well as the fuel which drives the process.

This is an area of research to watch.