| I’m gonna drop this here because it’s tangential and I think very important. I have a history of asd, migraine and rashes. As well as getting sick a lot and having weird health problems. About a year ago I went though one of those once or twice in a lifetime stress events. On the same night as the event, I experienced disturbed sleep. My sleep never went back to normal. Shortly after, I started to experience psychotic symptoms, usually around night. I had happened to read a doctors testimonial earlier about keto and psychosis so I tried it. It fixed both my sleep and my psychotic symptoms. Within one week of starting keto I was completely back to normal. Due to side effects of keto, namely “keto rash,” I was forced to stop. I ended up starting and stopping a lot. The correlation between starting and stoping keto and my symptoms was exact. I have a background in biology and I actively looked for any other correlation. There is zero ambiguity that keto was responsible for my astonishing remissions. I was diagnosed by a psychiatrist With psychotic depression and prescribed anti-psychotics, so the symptoms were real. Obviously I never took the medication. He brushed off my observation about keto. As time went forward the psychotic symptoms became small enough to just ignore even when off keto, only bothering me occasionally at night. My sleep never went back to normal while off keto. I started to return to a normal life when a few months later I encountered another health problem. I moved into a new house and because I’m cheap I bought a fixer. The fixer had mold. I stayed inside with a noticeable musty smell. I made sure to air it out and had plans to remediate it eventually. I googled mold health problems and nothing really came up so I assumed it was fine. But I started waking up with strange headaches and shaky hands. Then I started waking up with brain fog and headache. Then finally I started having bouts of ridiculous depression Along with the rest of what I’ve mentioned. I would have a 2 hour bout of those symptoms every other day roughly. The depression was so intense and so painful that it made me want to kill myself immediately. I have never experienced anything like that in my entire life and it was so bad that I think depression is not even the right word for it. The second time it happened I went to the ER. They scanned my brain and did tests and found nothing. My doctor said that nothing was wrong and that I just had depression and recommended antidepressants. But that didn’t explain all the strange symptoms that came with the depression which included extremely dry throat (oddly), weak limbs, and other smaller things. At this point I was emotionally exhausted because I felt very deeply that my brain was horribly broken in some way and there wasn’t a single lead to follow. Based on the circumstances of my life, I decided to throw in the towel. I have never committed to suicide with so little hesitation. I was completely tired of and done with life. No family anyway. But after thinking for a while, I decided I should just travel away from where I live and completely remove myself from any kind of environmental contaminants just on the off chance that it was something in the environment and that removing it would reverse the symptoms. I really didn’t think it would work, but it did. It took about three weeks, although there were still shadows of the symptoms sometimes. I had already looked into mold and there was nothing reported in mainstream sources. Oddly, some very sus homeopathic websites had articles that described my symptoms exactly. But they were littered with BS pseudo science and didn’t have any treatment options besides eating clay and other nonsense. I have been interested in ASD ever since I realized I had it. I have a case that is not obvious so I was not formally diagnosed until my mid twenties. So I was googling ASD research and I happened upon this new study that attributes ASD to something called cell danger response. Hypothetically, atp can be used as a signal molecule and cells can get stuck using atp for signaling rather than carrying out business as usual. I wasn’t too sure until I saw that they had done a trial with an old drug that blocks atp receptors on the surface of cells and showed marked improvement in autistic children. Small n but qualitatively meaningful and certainly warranting a larger study. It also lines up with one very peculiar quality of autism which is that it can be temporarily put into remission with TMS in some people, which indicates dormant brain networks rather than destroyed brain networks. Phase 2 trials are about to begin. Cell danger response is hypothesized to be a branch of the inflammatory system. And in reading about cell danger response I was made aware of another guy who was researching mast cells and micro glia, which are cells that are central to inflammation. This guy mainly studied mast cells. I listened to a podcast that interviewed him, I think it had less than a thousand views. He talked about all these papers he had published about basic mast cell biology. And it blew my mind. I’ll try to summarize all the important points. Mast cells are present in the deep regions of the brain that are responsible for emotions, sleep and other things. Mast cells Distribute inflammatory molecules like histamine, but critically they distribute way more molecules than just histamine. The molecules dispensed by mast cells can do all kinds of things, including dilate or constrict blood vessels. Mast cells are so general that when deactivated, wounds do not heal, as has been demonstrated experimentally. Mast cells can be agitated by many different kinds of chemicals and also stress. But critically, exposure to one specific thing can lower the threshold of the mast cells to be excited by other things. So at the end of the day what you have is a system where inputs can interact and create very complex emergent behaviors. When you combine this with the fact that only a fraction of the population has problems with inflammation, you have something that could have eluded medical science until now. Then this guy said something that really surprised me. He mentioned that mold can be a big problem with agitating mast cells and that he always recommends his patients to get away from mold if they are having weird problems and that it usually works. And the pieces start to come together. I have ASD. The only comorbidities of ASD are asthma (which I have a family history of) and skin rashes (I think) which are both problems of inflammation. Psychosis has been shown to be closely linked with inflammation in many cases. Depression has also been linked to inflammation. There is a disease called mast cell activation syndrome where people get rashes and other symptoms, usually triggered later in life by a stressful event. Bingo. And then it made sense why keto had helped me so much. Keto has been proven to have anti-inflammatory effects in at least one paper that studied one ketone body in particular. And there are also the myriad reports of people’s asthma and RA improving dramatically on keto. And it fits neatly into the broader theory that when the body thinks physical resources are scarce, like during excessive exercise or when running off body fat, it shuts down unnecessary things, including some parts of the inflammation system. Meanwhile, carbs have been shown to promote inflammation. The only study to properly investigate the link between keto and psychosis is currently underway in Finland and is expected to be finished by December. The final puzzle piece: after discovering this I had a hunch that my migraines were also caused by inflammation. And i remembered that after taking lsd for the first time, my headaches went away for years. So I googled “lsd inflammation.” lo and behold, all popular psychedelics have been shown to be extremely potent anti-inflamatories. There is one guy in particular who studies this and he has published papers and is currently in the process of commercializing the most potent anti-inflammatory that he has identified which is actually not lsd but an obscure cousin called DOI. Fascinatingly, the dose required to get the anti-inflammatory effect is much smaller than the dose at which the drug makes you trip. And I believe that was the case for all the big names. So at the end of the day, I stumbled upon a medical revolution that is still in the pipes. And it will be a revolution because inflammation is the cause of many things. Heart disease (yes, really), RA, and many other huge names. I wrote this marathon post on my phone so please excuse lack of sources and spelling mistakes. |
It shows that non-specialists have a crucial role in connecting the dots and helping researchers test and try hypotheses.
Are you still on Keto now? How did your symptoms evolve?
You should write a blog post on your story!