Interpreting the Genova Methylation Panel

This is hands down the best test, but you need to go beyond the interpretive section of the report to see all the patterns.

Methylation is important to hundreds of body processes, and these are the principle signs of imbalance.

Deficient Methylation: Fatty liver disease, neural tube birth defects, elevated homocysteine and associated cardiovascular risk, fatigue, poor exercise capacity, histamine intolerance, difficulty ignoring negative thoughts and thought patterns, depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, histamine intolerance, inability to adequately eliminate arsenic, inability to properly utilize selenium or excrete excess selenium. Severe deficiencies in methylation could contribute to deficiencies of zinc, copper, and perhaps other positively charged minerals. As with excessive methylation, possibly cancer.

Excess Methylation: Generally understudied with lower confidence compared to undermethylation. Among the best supported: distractibility, difficulty focusing, impulsivity, and substance abuse. More speculative: difficulty breaking free from psychological conditioning, difficulty falling asleep or poor quality sleep, and faster aging skin. As with deficient methylation, possibly cancer.

Simply testing homocysteine, folate, and B12 — as often done in routine labwork — will not give you enough information to properly assess why your methylation might run high, low, or see-saw back and forth unstably. For example your homocysteine could be normal simply because you aren’t converting methionine to S-adenosylmethionine. In that case your methylation runs low, but you would not see the rise in homocysteine you would otherwise expect under conditions of low methylation. This is because you never make any homocysteine so it stays normal even if you aren’t clearing it effectively.

Hands down, the best labwork to run for this is the Genova Methylation Panel. It breaks down every metabolite in the pathway to allow you to make inferences about why homocysteine might be low or high. However, I would not rely on the interpretive section in the panel report because, while it is helpful, it is not a complete display of all the relevant patterns. In particular, it does not deal properly with the energy deficiency pattern.

I would not use their genetic add-on. If looking for methylation-focused genetics I would use StrateGene because it is much more complete. However, I recommend everyone get whole genome sequencing and do it ASAP since the global supply of whole genome sequencing kits and turnaround times is increasingly under pressure. For now I use Sequencing.Com.

This post is is a guide to interpreting the Genova Methylation Panel reserved for Masterpass members. It updates and revises the methylation section of Testing Nutritional Status: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet and the energy deficiency pattern as described in How Energy Deficiency Hurts Methylation. It complements the brief and to-the-point lists of lab tests in the main menu.