It's all connected
May. 6th, 2016 23:13![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
torquillOn a related note, I have a few thoughts on how all my health stuff seems to tie together.
Pretty much none of this can be tested, let alone proven... but it came to me that the timing, where I started having hormone issues at about the same time as I started having mold toxicity issues, might be even less of a coincidence than I had first thought. Originally I chalked the linkage up to inflammation of the pituitary, which would explain why my cycle went weird. But it doesn't explain why I started getting sick from even small levels of birth control, and finally from my own endogenous estrogen. My levels, according to a couple of blood tests, aren't unusually high. So why would I be getting morning sickness and uterine spasms (and depression, and and and) at what looks like normal levels of estrogen?
I got repeated exposures to mycotoxins over the course of about 18 months, which increased my sensitivity enormously. What these mycotoxins are is a mystery, as very few of the compounds emitted by mold have been characterized, even for those species known to contribute to sick building syndrome. I have always reacted to the neurotoxin emitted by Stachybotrys, but my acquired intolerance to the "lesser" toxic molds has a different profile, including the brain inflammation which screwed up my optic nerve. So those compounds are somewhat different, and there's almost certainly multiple chemical types in there.
One thing I do know is that I read somewhere (heh) that one of the issues with toxic mold is that it can mimic biochemical signals, such as steroids. It's one of the reasons that chronic exposure messes with so many basic systems. What if, said I, one or more of those steroid analogues was in the same class as estrogen? What if it used the same elimination pathways, or resembled one of the metabolites of estrogen? What if exposure to the mycotoxins stressed, clogged, or broke the branch of cytochrome P450 involved in handling estrogen?
My body would react to endogenous estrogen differently. I could get oversensitive to it, as it didn't clear the body properly, or as the receptors got damaged or multiplied. I'd have trouble eliminating it as breakdown products landed on enzyme systems already crippled by mycotoxins. I'd start shunting those metabolites into other tissues and other systems not designed to handle them, creating strange intermediates which I might handle even less well. In other words, even small amounts would make me sick -- which is exactly what's happened.
Combine that with inconsistent regulation (my poor pituitary!) due to feedback problems, and I would essentially have a variable load of toxins being generated by my own body.
This theory -- which, as I say, is virtually impossible to test with my current resources -- makes me think that my desperate hail-mary attempt to get one variable out of the way may have a much broader beneficial effect than I had expected. It may be that the hypoestrogenic state induced by Lupron is exactly what I need to clear my strained detox pathways and, possibly, start to repair them. I've made significant progress with the pathways involved in glycol ether handling, though they will never again be sufficient... I'm more hopeful about the estrogenic pathways, if that's what I'm dealing with, due to the lesser degree of the damage and its gradual accumulation. If nothing else, getting my estrogen levels down to a consistent low level may free up detox resources I didn't have before now.
As my gyno said, I'm way over the heads of most doctors by now, though she knows an integrated med doctor with a passion for biochemistry who might be able to keep pace (that doctor is 300 miles away and out of network, however). I'm better equipped to be my own doctor than most people, at least, and I have the best seat in the house for collecting data. We'll see how this set of experiments turns out.
Pretty much none of this can be tested, let alone proven... but it came to me that the timing, where I started having hormone issues at about the same time as I started having mold toxicity issues, might be even less of a coincidence than I had first thought. Originally I chalked the linkage up to inflammation of the pituitary, which would explain why my cycle went weird. But it doesn't explain why I started getting sick from even small levels of birth control, and finally from my own endogenous estrogen. My levels, according to a couple of blood tests, aren't unusually high. So why would I be getting morning sickness and uterine spasms (and depression, and and and) at what looks like normal levels of estrogen?
I got repeated exposures to mycotoxins over the course of about 18 months, which increased my sensitivity enormously. What these mycotoxins are is a mystery, as very few of the compounds emitted by mold have been characterized, even for those species known to contribute to sick building syndrome. I have always reacted to the neurotoxin emitted by Stachybotrys, but my acquired intolerance to the "lesser" toxic molds has a different profile, including the brain inflammation which screwed up my optic nerve. So those compounds are somewhat different, and there's almost certainly multiple chemical types in there.
One thing I do know is that I read somewhere (heh) that one of the issues with toxic mold is that it can mimic biochemical signals, such as steroids. It's one of the reasons that chronic exposure messes with so many basic systems. What if, said I, one or more of those steroid analogues was in the same class as estrogen? What if it used the same elimination pathways, or resembled one of the metabolites of estrogen? What if exposure to the mycotoxins stressed, clogged, or broke the branch of cytochrome P450 involved in handling estrogen?
My body would react to endogenous estrogen differently. I could get oversensitive to it, as it didn't clear the body properly, or as the receptors got damaged or multiplied. I'd have trouble eliminating it as breakdown products landed on enzyme systems already crippled by mycotoxins. I'd start shunting those metabolites into other tissues and other systems not designed to handle them, creating strange intermediates which I might handle even less well. In other words, even small amounts would make me sick -- which is exactly what's happened.
Combine that with inconsistent regulation (my poor pituitary!) due to feedback problems, and I would essentially have a variable load of toxins being generated by my own body.
This theory -- which, as I say, is virtually impossible to test with my current resources -- makes me think that my desperate hail-mary attempt to get one variable out of the way may have a much broader beneficial effect than I had expected. It may be that the hypoestrogenic state induced by Lupron is exactly what I need to clear my strained detox pathways and, possibly, start to repair them. I've made significant progress with the pathways involved in glycol ether handling, though they will never again be sufficient... I'm more hopeful about the estrogenic pathways, if that's what I'm dealing with, due to the lesser degree of the damage and its gradual accumulation. If nothing else, getting my estrogen levels down to a consistent low level may free up detox resources I didn't have before now.
As my gyno said, I'm way over the heads of most doctors by now, though she knows an integrated med doctor with a passion for biochemistry who might be able to keep pace (that doctor is 300 miles away and out of network, however). I'm better equipped to be my own doctor than most people, at least, and I have the best seat in the house for collecting data. We'll see how this set of experiments turns out.
