I was in a hotel in Alberta a week ago and had gotten back late from visiting a friend in Pincher Creek. Earlier in the day, before we left, I was at the front desk when a man wheeled his wife into the lobby, who was disabled. I had a feeling she had MS - but thought no more of it til that night. Around 1pm, I had just left the lobby with a relieved attendant (the one I had been pumping for information for the previous two days) and was looking at a regional map they had on a wall. After a while, I saw a man coming down the hall with a large stand fan. The A/C in his room was down or some such a matter. When he passed me again, I felt to ask him if his wife was suffering from MS. He seemed surprised that I knew. I decided to really freak him out, and stated that she started out with tingling in the fingertips/feet, dizziness, balance issues, memory loss (difficulty in recall) and many other symptoms that progressively worsened. Again, he seemed surprised that I knew - I mean I really had his attention now. I knew he most likely would not blow me off as a quack and I would not be wasting my breath - as I usually do with many folks. I told him that there is a way to overcome those symptoms - although, for as long as hers had been dragging on, she would never fully recover as the myelinopathy is cumulative and is not always fully repairable/reversible unless you catch it early in the process of decline. For about 20 mins I told her about how to back his wife out of her condition and that they could purchase a 10 month supply of injectable B-12 there in town at the pharmacy - and without a prescription. The cost of that was $10 - and that would be less than one copay at the doctor's office for a single injection of B-12. Her causation was stress and she probably did not have a history of mental illness in her family, so the diagnosis was myelin neuropathy manifested as MS. BTW - the meds she was taking (at taxpayer expense) were $18,000/month. Yep - you have that right - around a cool quarter mil on the Rx books for something that could be fully CURED for less than a hundred a year. Four of those cases and a cool one mil for the Rx gangsters. Four thousand of those cases? A cool one billion for the modern Capones with cajones - if you ever wonder where the mafia and all that organized crime went? Just look where the big-pharma is located - Jersey. They all got three piece suits and degrees and are fleecing the public to the tune of trillions of dollars - and the average taxpayer/citizen is thanking them for being the "miracle workers" that they are...... Yep - you are getting RIPPED OFF..... And then there is the emotional cost and wasted human effort - the husband had to quit his job to take care of her full time - and go on welfare...... To my nice troll (term of endearment - I am sorry for what you are going through! That is terrible - but I am certain your son will do fine in the judgment! Please don't give it another thought if his departure was medical any more than someone who is B-12 deficient and commits suicide is going to hell), this is part of the hair ripping out frustration that I am feeling as we embark on "bummer care" to further fill the coffers of these gads...... Grrrr...... They know what they are doing - and it is on purpose....... Now, what did I just say about paranoia......? :)
That "MS" is what I had under the stress of dealing with the loss of our kid and my wife having her issues which ran the gamut of the psychological spectrum. All the meds she took cost our health plan several thousand a month and just the copays alone were killing our budget - and forget about the damage it did to her health in the interrim. If there is a problem getting the B-12 into your system naturally (through the gut), you are toast unless you know about the injectable option. The problem is that many women who have their gall bladder out after a particularly difficult pregnancy, or after a bout with kidney stones, or after a particularly stressful event such as a death of a loved one, divorce, heavy surgery (anesthesia and chronic pain kill B-12 levels), job loss, foreclosure, etc - the system for getting that B-12 into the system is broken. Many times, the panic attacks, schizophrenia, paranoia, rapid speech, hypersexuality (promiscuity), drug usage, rejection of family values, etc that are hereditary are due not to "mental illness" being hereditary, per-se - but its due to a hereditary factor that prevents the assimilation of B-12 into the system, such as inhibited secretion of intrinsic factor in the stomach, not enough gall released into the small intestine or a hereditary condition that makes one more susceptible to allergies. This is the thrust of this article. Gluten intolerance. If you have this - basically you get the cruds after eating a sandwich with wheat bread or Wheaties for breakfast - you will most likely basically go nuts, get MS or Alzheimers one day when your brain plaques up. I have put articles on here talking about how changes in the wheat back in the 60's basically made it GMO. Our bodies did not react well, and the incidence of the use of psychotropic meds shot up. The two can be correlated.
The following article backs this up big-time. I hope this has helped someone out there. Seriously - a single person's life affected for the better makes all the sore sausages worth typing this out. Incidentally, I mentioned the engineer from southern Alberta that got me turned onto B-12 after he "figured it out" after his wife committed suicide and two of his eight children were plummeting into the same darkness. I know someone who knows him and I plan on hooking up with him and thanking him and swapping notes. Here it is, finally:
Evolutionary Psychiatry
The hunt for evolutionary solutions to contemporary mental health problems.
Wheat and Schizophrenia
Could bread and pasta be behind the pathogenesis of schizophrenia?Schizophrenia is an unfortunate disease of the brain. A progressive disorder, it often presents with social withdrawal, paranoia, hearing voices, that sort of thing. After quite a while (sometimes decades) you get a kind of "burnout" effect where the voices and whatnot lessen, but the afflicted is left with all the negative symptoms of social withdrawal, thought blocking, and an inexpressiveness known as "flat affect." MRI of the brain will show "large ventricles" at this point, meaning cell death (brain damage) has caused the active, lively part of the brain to shrink. You'll see schizophrenia in any large public park in any major city. If you ask the guy on the bench that everyone is avoiding if he wants something to eat, and he answers with paranoid meaningless word salad, that's schizophrenia, most likely. He had parents, brothers, sisters, maybe even a college degree. Even if he wanted to stay in a treatment facility or group home, in most places there aren't enough spots for all the mentally ill, so many end up homeless or in jail. A tough road for someone with an organic brain disease.
Most of the research on schizophrenia is focused on the neurotransmitters dopamine, acetylcholine, and histamine and genetic polymorphisms of transporters and receptors. The usual questions are asked about ineffective brain chemistry. The usual treatment is neuroleptic medication (hopefully decreases excess dopamine in the right place and leaves it well enough alone in other corners of the brain). And I've seen medicine do a decent job of clearing up the psychosis symptoms many times. Medicine tends to have pretty serious side effects, though, so a big push in research these days is to identify those folks at high risk for schizophrenia before it happens, hopefully to prevent the illness in the first place through various means. Often those means include more medications - but with Big Pharma funding many studies, those are the solutions that are found.
One intrepid researcher, F. Curtis Dohan, spent a lot of his career chasing an unlikely suspect in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia, wheat. His fascinating paper, Genetic Hypothesis of Idiopathic Schizophrenia: It's Exorphin Connection, can be found in free full text via the link.
Anyway, there's a funny thing about schizophrenia, turns out that quite a few of the adult schizophrenics on an inpatient psychiatric unit in 1967 happened to have a major history of celiac disease (gluten/wheat intolerance) as children. As in 50-100 times the amount of celiac disease that one would expect by chance. Celiac doctors also noticed their patients were schizophrenic about 10X as often as the general population. That's a lot! In addition, epidemiological studies of Pacific Islanders and other populations showed a strong, dose-dependent relationship between grain intake and schizophrenia. The gluten-free populations had extremely rare occurrence of schizophrenia - just 2 in 65,000 versus about 1 in 100 as we have in the grain-eating West. When populations Westernized their diets (flour, sugar, and beer), schizophrenia became common. In some clinical trials, gluten made new-onset acutely ill schizophrenics much worse, but only occasional long-term patients responded to gluten restriction. The long-term sufferer has already had a lot of damage - if wheat somehow toxic to the brain, then it would be vital to stop the insult early on in the course of the disease to see improvement.
National Institutes of Health investigators looked for poisonous protein fragments derived from gluten, gliadin (wheat proteins), and casein (a milk protein). They found them - potent opiate (yes, opiate as in morphine. Or heroin) analogs they called "exorphins." Many of these studies were done in rats, and the results are very creepy if you are fond of bread and milk (or rats). Turns out, you take wheat gluten, add stomach enzymes, and you end up with fragments of proteins that are potent opiates (1). The cute thing is these fragments aren't digested by the small intestine and definitely end up in the body and brain of rats that are fed gluten orally. Inject these same proteins directly into the brains of poor unfortunate rats, and you get rat seizures. Interestingly, people with schizophrenia seem to have a lot of these opioid-like small gluten-derived peptides in their urine. Way more than people without schizophrenia.
Let me review what is perhaps the most important part of the Dohan paper - a gluten-free diet definitely improved some of the new-onset schizophrenics on the inpatient unit. Not all of them. But 2 out of 17 or so. Putting back the wheat made the affected a lot worse. In another study, 115 patients on a locked ward were all given a gluten free milk free diet. They were released into the community on average twice as fast as the similar patients on another, diet as usual ward (p=.009). It is of note that repeat studies didn't show the same thing, but instead of 17 or 115 patients, these studies had 4 or 8 patients, and these were studies of people who had schizophrenia for many years, where much damage was already done.
Historically, prior to WWII, when grain consumption was super-high and neuroleptics (those medications, as you recall, which affect brain dopamine levels and are used to treat schizophrenia) did not yet exist, there are reports of schizophrenics having marked and unexplained fluctuations in weight and gut symptoms, poor iron absorption just like celiac sufferers, and "post-mortem abnormalities like those subsequently discovered in celiac patients." Why aren't these found now? Well, Dohan contended that a side effect of these neuroleptic medications is that they decrease the permeability of the gut. Meaning gluten may not be able to weasel through quite so easily.
Which begs the question, is that the side effect? Or perhaps the principle effect? Who knows? Dohan's paper was published in 1988 and ended with some ideas about how to study the question further (such as by feeding identical twins of schizophrenics a high gluten diet to see what happens - somehow I don't think that experimental design would pass an institutional review board nowadays.) Well, nothing much happened research-wise until around 2005, but what has been discovered is interesting. There is no "smoking gun," but there certainly is a lot of smoke.
In Markers of Gluten Sensitivity and Celiac Disease in Recent-Onset Psychosis and Multi-Episode Schizophrenia it was found that individuals with recent-onset psychosis and with multi-episode schizophrenia who have increased antibodies to gliadin may share some immunologic features of celiac disease, but their immune response to gliadin differs from that of celiac disease.
In this very clever work done by Samaroo and Dickerson et al, published as Novel immune response to gluten in individuals with schizophrenia, immune responses and celiac disease biomarkers were tested in schizophrenics. It turns out that schizophrenics tended to have a lot of anti-wheat antibodies floating around in their systems, but these antibodies were nearly entirely different from the ones that people with celiac disease have. That means that the usual test for gluten issues, the tests for celiac, wouldn't come up positive in schizophrenics, even though they have unusual immune reactions to wheat.
In A Case Report of the Resolution of Schizophrenic Symptoms on a Ketogenic Diet, a high fat, low carb, low protein diet (thus very low in wheat) results in the remission of psychotic symptoms in a single case report.
The bottom line? Schizophrenia is a progressive and destructive psychotic mental illness that, at the moment, can sometimes be managed with medications and community therapeutic support, but does not have a cure. It seems that a certain subset of schizophrenics have an unusual immune response to gluten and other various wheat proteins, and in a small number, going wheat-free has been extremely helpful. A gluten-free diet is safe and doesn't have side effects - I don't see a good argument against giving it a try for anyone with schizophrenia who is willing to give it a go, at least for three months. The worst thing that happens is you find you are not one of the gluten-sensitive schizophrenics, and you've gone without bread and pasta for a little while. The best thing that happens is that your symptoms get better, possibly quite a lot better.
More articles like this one at Evolutionary Psychiatry
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Copyright Emily Deans M.D.
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