19 Comments
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Sue T's avatar

Thank you Chris, you've been very helpful!

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Jon's avatar

Any thoughts on high dose methyl folate/deplin for depression? Or is it just a bandaid on an error in energy metabolism?

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Chris Masterjohn, PhD's avatar

Depression is heterogeneous in causation so you can’t automatically say whether a treatment is root cause or bandaid, but generally speaking no one needs such high doses of folate. It isn’t a strongly optimized treatment for anything except perhaps a folate transporter defect.

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HarryE's avatar

Hi Chris

I feel sleepy all day when I eat carbs, and great when I don’t. I want to do some tests while I’m traveling to the US, for example the Organic Acids Test and the Genova ION Profile + 40. Which diet should I follow in the days before the test?

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Chris Masterjohn, PhD's avatar

Also if it only requires one meal to produce that you probably don’t need to do it for days.

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Chris Masterjohn, PhD's avatar

The one that makes you sleepy all day.

Unless you want to know the reason you are normal when you are normal, which I would predict would show that you are normal when you are normal because you are normal when you are normal. :)

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HarryE's avatar

Looking at the cheat sheet, there is one HDRI link and lots of LabCorp links. Can I simply order these tests online somewhere or do I need a doctor to get them for me?

If I happen to have a cold, are the big panels still worth taking? Or does that mess it up sufficiently that I should hold off for another time?

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Chris Masterjohn, PhD's avatar

All tests should always be run in the condition you are trying to test. As such it is better to not have a cold when you do any tests.

Go to the energy metabolism governs everything post and scroll to the bottom and see the links for the “comprehensive screening.”

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Sue T's avatar

May I have the page number for the chart you mentioned referring to the symptoms and diseases related to Errors in Respiratory Chain Disorders? Love the book, I received it yesterday! Thank you very much!

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Chris Masterjohn, PhD's avatar

I have sixth edition in hardcover but 7th in Kindle, so I’m not sure the page number. You should find it quickly if you look for the respiratory chain chapter in the index and go to it. It should be a large multi-page table.

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Sue T's avatar

Thank you, I checked yesterday and today and the only thing listed for respiratory chain is in the index and is on page 148 which is a very brief description.

I did find a table in "Disorders of oxidative Phosphorylation"(chapter 10 in 7th edition) which is titled "Clinical features of mitochondrial disease". I have not found any table or chapter from the index or table of contents called "respiratory chain". They probably made changes with my edition.

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Chris Masterjohn, PhD's avatar

It’s chapter 10 tables 1 and 2.

Sorry they use several terms interchangeably.

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Sue T's avatar

Thanks, that's the table I found earlier! At least I was on track :)

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Chris's avatar

Great!

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Simas's avatar

Does mitoswab help in pinpointing the specific disorder in your experience? Is it worth the money?

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Josh's avatar

Hi, very interesting article. Do you have a recommendation for a clinical geneticist?

What could cause energy "crashes" after straight ketone ester drinks?

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Chris Masterjohn, PhD's avatar

I gave my recommendations above. See someone local, probably with bad results. Find someone actively publishing who is a renowned expert, probably hard to get in contact with.

Ketones lower glucose and at high concentrations elicit an insulin response. Might not be anything super abnormal if it's similar to getting sleepy at lunch, but could be an abnormality in ketone utilization if it is highly specific to ketones.

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Meepomeep's avatar

Yes I have high levels of several hormones that are supposed to make people fat but I've been paradoxically underweight my entire life. Yet no one wants to investigate

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Chris Masterjohn, PhD's avatar

Hormones are never in control of anything. They are responding to something, and something that usually responds to them isn’t. If they could talk, they would describe their frustrations as middle managers to you, but they report to your hypothalamus as CEO rather than to your prefrontal cortex. See the testing in “energy metabolism governs everything” for what might generate insights.

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