This post, entitled “Some Doctors Don’t Believe In This Disease Yet it Predisposes Many Diseases” was published on Collective Evolution on 03/17/14.
http://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/03/17/mitochondrial-diseases/
Frustratingly little is known about mitochondria and the role that they play in human illness. I hope that this will change soon.
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Lisa,
In addition to these considerations concering mitochondrial dysfunction / oxidative stress, have you seen an auto-immune connection in your research? The reason I ask is that fluoroquinolone toxicity mimicks many auto-immune conditions, and the symptoms are almost identical to ME/CFS. What are your thoughts?
Thank you as always,
Lane
Hi Lane,
I’ll give my answer to the easier question first – I think that ME/CFS is mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative stress. I think that it’s caused by multiple things that injur mitochondria, not just FQs, but I think that FQs are also a major culprit. As you mentioned, the symptoms of FQ toxicity and ME/CFS are the same.
I think that the immune disorder question is more difficult and I don’t have a very good, or very developed answer to that question. FQ toxicity most definitely mimics the symptoms of an autoimmune disease. But there are many possibilities to why and how this happens, and I’m not sure what the answer is. It’s possible that mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative stress feels a lot like an autoimmune disease – but it’s not. Mass apoptosis, or the rapid aging of our cells may present itself as everything shutting down, which may feel like an autoimmune disease. Or, FQ toxicity might trigger an underlying autoimmune disease. I’ve read some fascinating articles recently about how the chemical messengers produced in mitochondria (ROS, RNS, antioxidants, etc.) determine/control gene expression. Maybe autoimmune disease genes get turned on by FQs. Another possibility is that maybe the mitochondria of our immune system cells, our lymphocites, are damaged and when that happens, an autoimmune disease is triggered. Here is an article about how FQs deplete lymphocyte chromosomes – http://www.nmcth.edu/images/gallery/Editorial/xRZVmps_ambulkar.pdf Also, thinking that FQs triggered an autoimmune disease led me to break down an article into this post – https://floxiehope.com/2013/12/17/article-breakdown-mitochondrial-reactive-oxygen-species-control-t-cell-activation-by-regulating-il-2-and-il-4-expression-mechanism-of-ciprofloxacin-mediated-immunosuppression/ and I think that there are likely some answers to FQ toxicity in researching how FQs affect immune system mitochondria.
That was quite a long-winded “I don’t know,” wasn’t it? 🙂
Thanks for asking my thoughts on the matter, Lane! I think that between all of us that are looking into this, we’ll figure it out. I hope so.
Best regards,
Lisa
Lane, this is interesting – http://www.hormonesmatter.com/molecular-mimicry-autoimmune-disease/. It may relate.
This article may have some answers to your question, Lane – http://www.jleukbio.org/content/74/3/456.full