Rest assured that I am not at all disputing that chemicals in the air (from cooking, household cleaning products, etc) can trigger MCAS symptoms. I appreciate that this can be one of the many ways that mast cell degranulation and MCAS symptoms are triggered.
In fact, somebody I know had to taken into hospital care after cooking oil spilt onto the hot surface of the kitchen oven and turned into smoke. When she breathed in the smoke, it triggered some severe mental health symptoms (which she suffers from anyway, on and off), and she needed hospital care for some weeks as a result. I am not sure whether she has MCAS, MCS or a classic IgE allergic response, but in her case it seems to affect her brain.
What I was saying earlier is that it is not the actual smell of the chemical in the air that triggers the MCAS symptoms, it is the action of that chemical on the mast cells in your body. The smell of a chemical is something purely concocted by your sense of smell (olfactory organs and brain).
In other words, if you lost your sense of smell, and could not smell anything, MCAS symptoms would still be triggered by certain chemicals in the air.
But these subtleties are only important if one is interested in examining the causal mechanisms of MCAS and MCS. In the case of MCAS, the sense of smell is not thought to be part of the causal mechanism; but in the case of MCS, the sense of smell may well be involved in the causal mechanism.
I have just been looking around in my MCAS folder on my computer for anything interesting (my memory these days is totally shot, so anything I read of interest I save in the relevant folder on my computer — tedious, but that is the only way I can function); I found some interesting things:
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Leukotriene inhibitor drugs like montelukast (Singular) are used to treat MCAS; has anyone any experience with those? The frankincense-dervied supplement
5-loxin® is a leukotriene inhibitor. I wonder if that might help.
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Advanced glycation end products (AGEs) activate mast cells. AGEs are created in cooking whenever you brown a food (eg, the brown crust on roast potatoes, baked cakes or bread, or the browning on grilled meat are examples of advanced glycation end products). Browning is the
Maillard reaction. I wonder whether avoiding AGEs in cooking might help reduce MCAS symptoms.
• The supplements:
luteolin (not be confused with lutein),
diosmin (aka diosmetin) and
apigenin are mast cell stabilizers. And kaempferol, fisetin, quercetin and morin have anti-allergic properties. Source:
Twenty-first century mast cell stabilizers
• Borrelia, Mycoplasma pneumoniae, Aspergillus and Staphylococcus delta toxin are known to activate mast cells. So addressing any infections or co-infections with these pathogens (that are treatable) may reduce MCAS symptoms. Mycoplasma pneumoniae co-infection is sometimes found in ME/CFS, and can be treated with antibiotics.