I have this from Rich (RIP) too:
"one is about the Glutathione Depletion-
-Methylation Cycle Block Hypothesis for the Pathogenesis of CFS.
It's based on my past work on glutathione depletion in CFS, and also
on what's going on in autism research, where Jill and
coworkers have found that glutathione depletion there is linked to a
block in the methylation cycle. As I've mentioned before, it looks
to me as though the same thing is going on in at least a major
subset of PWCs.
So what I've been doing today is to try to figure out what the
effects of a blocked methylation cycle are, and to see if these are
things that show up in CFS. One of the several things I've come
upon is the fact that the deactivation of histamine requires
methylation reactions. Thus, if a person has a blocked methylation
cycle and thus decreased capacity for methylation (because the ratio
of S-adenosylmethionine to S-adenosylhomocysteine drops, and this
blocks the methyltransferase enzymes), then I think we should expect
that if they have an allergic reaction to something, the histamine
will rise higher and stay up longer than it would in a person with
normal methylation capacity. Therefore, the allergic reaction would
be expected to be more severe.
This would explain why, even though the prevalence of IgE allergies
in PWCs is not significantly different from that in the general
population, the PWCs would experience more severe reactions when
they did get them. It would also explain why allergies they had
prior to developing CFS were observed to get worse after their CFS
onset."