TD

Childhood Trauma, Diet, and Behavior

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Adverse Childhood Experiences and the Diet Variable

Nearly one in eight children (12%) are reported to have had three or more negative life experiences associated with levels of stress that can harm their health and development. In 2011, nearly 60% of children age 17 and younger were exposed to violence within the year, either directly as victims or indirectly as witnesses. Twenty-one per cent of children in the United States suffer from mild behavioral health problems and an additional 11% struggle to overcome significant behavioral health, according to the Adverse Childhood Experiences study. This estimate translates into a total of 4 million youth who suffer from major mental illness (US Department of Health and Human Services 1999, 123-124). An estimated 26% of Americans aged 18 and older (about one in four or over 57 million adults) suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.

As if this were not enough, the Children’s Crisis Treatment Center in Philadelphia indicated that “in 2011, 29% of students in grades 9 through 12 reported feeling sad or hopeless almost every day for two or more weeks in a row in a year. Up to 70% of children and teenagers in the juvenile justice system have a diagnosable mental health disorder and up to 44% of high school students suffering from behavioral health issues drop out of school”.  If these statistics are accurate, they are deplorable.

Malnutrition as a Major Cause of Brain Disease

With these huge numbers involved, of many potentially causative issues, there is considerable evidence that bad nutrition may dominate them. It is interesting that, many years ago, a Probation Officer in Cuyahoga Falls in Ohio persuaded a judge to hand over to her care all the juvenile criminals that stood trial in his court. She regulated their diet and supervised it. The recidivism (habitual lapsing back into crime) dropped to almost zero. Unfortunately, good nutrition is commonly overcome by hedonism (love of pleasure) and is usually governed by the sweet taste. There are two aspects to this. Sugar in all its different forms precipitates thiamine deficiency and the signal from the tongue to the brain is responsible for its addictive qualities. There is little doubt that thiamine deficiency is heavily responsible for much of the mental disease that is so commonly represented in our culture. It is especially damaging to the lower part of the brain that governs our emotional responses and our ability to adapt to a hostile environment. Because thiamine deficiency produces an effect similar to that of oxygen deficiency (hypoxia) it has been seen as a cause of pseudo-hypoxia (false hypoxia). Either true or false hypoxia is interpreted by the brain as a potentially dangerous threat to the organism.

Some years ago I had the opportunity to visit the Philadelphia Crisis Treatment Center that then existed under another name. I learned of a neurosurgeon who had been deeply involved with its original inception. He had suggested that seizures (epilepsy) were caused by a deficiency of oxygen (hypoxia) in the brain, perhaps explaining the usual resistance of juvenile seizures to drug treatment. Although the statistics above did not specify the nature of “major mental illness” in 4 million youths, I pondered over the years whether hypoxia or any part of its equivalent mechanisms (pseudo-hypoxia) could be the underlying cause common to brain disease in a variety of different expressions, including even epilepsy in some cases.

After my visit to Philadelphia, I had an opportunity to test the neurosurgeon’s suggestion by treating a 12-year-old boy in “status epilepticus” after his current medication had been suddenly withdrawn. I gave him an intravenous injection of thiamine tetrahydrofurfuryl disulfide (TTFD), a synthetic derivative of thiamine) and this quickly stopped the continuous seizuring. I then started TTFD by oral administration but it was discontinued by a neurologist who saw the incident as “spontaneous remission and nothing to do with vitamin therapy”. Unfortunately, I did not have any data to be able to publish the case. Status epilepticus is the name given to a situation where the seizuring is continuous and often very difficult to stop. It usually occurs when a medication is suddenly withdrawn. Many years later, I discovered that thiamine deficiency could produce the same symptoms as brain hypoxia, thus giving rise to describing this deficiency as pseudo-hypoxia (false hypoxia). I had evidently treated the SE by relieving the pseudo-hypoxia in the brain cells responsible for this patient’s potentially fatal illness.

Maternal Diet and Neurological Development

There is growing concern about the long-term neurologic effects of prenatal exposure to maternal overweight and obesity, a result of malnutrition. The causes of epilepsy are poorly understood and in more than 60% of the patients no definite cause can be determined. Authors from the well-known Karolinska Institute showed that there was indeed a relationship between obesity in pregnancy and the risk of epilepsy in the offspring. Although the mechanism is not articulated, micronutrient deficiency may be culpable. Increasingly, it has become clear that a person’s weight does not correspond to their nutritional status. Indeed, in many cases, obesity is associated with a state malnutrition; a malnutrition we call high calorie malnutrition.

Clinical thiamine deficiency is defined by both consistent clinical symptoms and either a low whole-blood thiamine concentration, significant improvement, or resolution of consistent clinical symptoms after receiving thiamine supplementation. Of 400 obese patients, 66 (16.5%) were shown to have clinical thiamine deficiency. Their symptoms included gastrointestinal, cardiac, peripheral neurologic and neuropsychiatric manifestations, the characteristic symptoms of beriberi. Hypoxia threatens brain function during the entire life span, starting from early fetal age up to senescence. A relatively common condition in newborns is lack of adequate oxygen supply to the brain and is known as hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy. This has been shown to correlate with multiple organ dysfunction and must surely be a severe legacy in the affected child.

The outstanding question then is whether poor diet, perhaps coupled with genetic risk in some cases, could be a substantial causative factor in widespread brain illness. Dr. Marrs and I have published considerable evidence that high calorie malnutrition, by inducing thiamine deficiency, is widespread throughout America and is responsible for a variety of brain related symptoms. With an excess of simple carbohydrate calories, the action of thiamine in burning those calories is overwhelmed. Thiamine might well be in a sufficient concentration for a healthy diet but insufficient for an excess of empty calories. It is the proper calorie/thiamine ratio that results in oxidative efficiency. Unfortunately, the many symptoms produced by thiamine deficiency in the brain are not recognized by the vast majority of physicians for what they represent. If thiamine deficiency is even suspected, they find a “normal” blood level of thiamine that is the usual result in moderate deficiency. The symptoms are falsely attributed to “a more acceptable diagnosis”. No appropriate laboratory tests are usually performed and in many cases the patient is diagnosed with psychosomatic disease, without even considering a necessary underlying mechanism.

High Calorie Malnutrition and Emotional Lability

This kind of malnutrition can severely affect emotional reactions, resulting in a variety of manifestations that include persistent anxiety, depression and bizarre behavior. We have even suggested that poor emotional control can lead to expressions of violence that hitherto have had no explanation for their almost daily occurrence in America. Poverty, poor education, environmental pollution and hedonism are all components that are predictable causative agents. When energy production in the brain is compromised by inefficient use of oxygen (oxidation), the affected person is unable to muster an adequate biological response in the process of adapting to virtually any form of stress. The affected patient is also wide open to succumbing from infection by any microorganism. Brain function becomes abnormal from lack of energy drive.

This may explain the breakdown in health in the children exposed to the stress of active (physical) or passive (mental) violence referred to at the beginning of this post. The well-known saying that “we are what we eat” should be broadened to “we behave according to what we eat”. So many books have advocated the principles of healthy nutrition, without producing much overall health improvement. There is a fairly consistent refusal to “give up” sugar, mainly because its ubiquitous consumption makes it hard to understand its inherent danger to complete health and its addictive properties. Perhaps a more logical attitude might be required to the use of nutritional supplements. The pharmaceutical industry has most people attuned to consumption of pills, so that a transfer of principle would probably be easy. However, it also demands a realization that disease can be reduced to an understanding of energy deficiency as the root cause.

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This article was published originally on January 13, 2020. 

 

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Thiamine Deficiency Testing: Understanding the Labs

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It has recently been found that a number of individuals who have experienced adverse reactions to the Gardasil or Cervarix vaccines and some medications have had a blood test that indicated thiamine deficiency (TD), or its abnormal chemistry (TAC) in the body. This article reviews the methods by which TD or TAC can be detected.

Blood Thiamine – Vitamin B1 Concentrations

Measuring blood thiamine or B1 concentrations is the laboratory test that is commonly offered by doctors. It is only helpful in extreme cases and is usually in the normal range even when there is clinically demonstrable abnormal body chemistry. The reason for this is that thiamine does its work inside cells and has no effect outside them. When we get this vitamin from our natural food, it goes through a very important genetically determined process to enter our cells. There can be something wrong with this system so that even a dietary sufficiency will not be effective and the concentration in the blood will be in the “normal” range. When the B1 is inside a cell, it has to be treated by a biochemical process known as phosphorylation to become an active vitamin. Failure of this mechanism will result in a “normal” blood level but no vitamin activity. We therefore have to use a method that actually detects this “vital” activity.

Erythrocyte Transketolase: The Test of Choice for Assessing Thiamine Deficiency

Erythrocyte is the technical name for red cells. These are the cells that carry oxygen to our tissues and they contain a complex mechanism that depends on a series of biochemical processes, each of which requires an enzyme. Transketolase is one of these enzymes. Its activity can be detected by a laboratory test and measuring transketolase is the only way of showing that the activity of thiamine is normal. The reason for this is that all the enzymes in body and brain cells require one or more “cofactors” that enable the enzyme to function properly. Vitamins and some minerals are cofactors and that is why they are so important. We have long known that they have to be obtained from our diet, but the reasons given above make it clear that dietary intake may be normal and still result in poor function of the enzyme in question.

Transketolase requires two cofactors, thiamine and magnesium and the laboratory test is designed to show their deficiency or abnormal chemistry by detecting the activity of the enzyme. Because thiamine is vital to cellular energy production, its deficiency affects first the tissues that are the most active oxygen using tissues, the brain, nervous system and heart.

Method of Performing Erythrocyte Transketolase Test

First, the baseline (as it exists in the patient’s red cells) activity of the enzyme is detected by measuring the rate at which it synthesizes its product, the chemical substance next in line in the series of biochemical reactions that are referred to as a “pathway” to the final end product. This is reported as TKA and it has a normal range. In moderate thiamine deficiency the TKA can still be in the normal range but if it is low it indicates that the enzyme is not doing its job efficiently.

The next step is to repeat the test after the addition of thiamine pyrophosphate (the biologically active form of the vitamin) to the test tube reaction. If there is an acceleration of the product synthesis, it indicates that the enzyme needed its cofactor to become efficient in its job. This is reported as a “percentage increase in activity over baseline”. This is called TPPE (thiamine pyrophosphate effect); the higher the TPPE, the greater the deficiency.  A “normal” range for TPPE is allowed up to 18% and this was drawn from people that were supposedly “healthy”, meaning free of symptoms.

In essence the TPPE should be zero, indicating that the enzyme is fully saturated with its cofactor. If a person is (unknowingly) sensitive to sugar, this test may be abnormal and show the effect of sugar in that individual. This is because thiamine is vitally necessary to metabolism of ALL simple sugars. That is the reason why sugar caused disease is so common in our world today.

In order to test thiamine deficiency, one must request transketolase testing. Not all labs can perform this test and so many will substitute the simple blood vitamin B1 testing. This test is insufficient for detecting thiamine deficiency for the reasons stated above. In this case, you may have to advocate on your own behalf and find the appropriate lab testing service.

Additional Labs

Since the publication of this article, the US lab performing these tests has closed. We have just learned a lab in London offers transketolase testing: Biolab Medical Unit. As we learn of additional labs offering the appropriates tests we will post them here.

Health Diagnostics and Research Institute in New Jersey also apparently will test for thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP) and erythrocyte transketolase (ETKA), but these tests are not listed on their menu and have to be requested.

In Germany – SYNLAB MVZ Leinfelden-Echterdingen GmbH
Labor Dr. Bayer
Nikolaus-Otto-Str. 6
70771 Leinfelden-Echterdingen / Germany

In Spain – Estudios Analiticos – Avenida nuevo mundo 11 (Madrid)
http://www.eaac.es
Email: info@eaac.es
Telephone: 916334223
Fax: 91 533 10 44 / 91 632 44 17
Information: Monday to Friday: 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Saturdays: 9:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.

We Need Your Help

More people than ever are reading Hormones Matter, a testament to the need for independent voices in health and medicine. We are not funded and accept limited advertising. Unlike many health sites, we don’t force you to purchase a subscription. We believe health information should be open to all. If you read Hormones Matter, like it, please help support it. Contribute now.

Yes, I would like to support Hormones Matter. 

Image by Tatiana from Pixabay.

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