Mitochondrial Damage: Can it be repaired?

Yes.

Drugs designed to target one aspect of aging also seem to help repair DNA damage and regulate gene activity, preventing them from going haywire with the stresses of time.

"In principle, we now could have a way of reversing the effects of aging," said David Sinclair, a Harvard University gerontologist and co-founder of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, a company best-known for its development of an experimental drug called resveratrol.
Resveratrol and similar compounds activate an enzyme called SIRT1. The enzyme rejuvenates mitochondria, the machines that power our cells. Mitochondrial breakdown has been associated with many age-related diseases, including heart disease, diabetes and dementia. Several labs in addition to Sirtris are researching compounds that target mitochondria.
The new findings suggest that SIRT1 fixes DNA in addition to mitochondria.

Sinclair's team found that unless SIRT1 enzymes gathered at sites where DNA had started to unravel, other DNA repair proteins failed to arrive. This allowed damage to progress, eventually causing dormant genes to come alive, a process called deregulation.
Some researchers think gene deregulation is a cause of aging: As cells get older, they produce less SIRT1, ostensibly becoming less able to repair faulty DNA and suppress the dormant genes.

But in mice either given resveratrol or genetically engineered to produce extra SIRT1 on their own, repairs went smoothly and quickly.
"One idea of why we age is that DNA becomes damaged or mutated," said Sinclair, lead author of the research published Wednesday in Cell. "But perhaps the main culprit is the effect of genes switching on and off, and that should be reversible."

Link


What to do? Detailed information for chronic fatigue patients but useful and informative for all to follow is in a pdf - here.
http://www.ijcem.com/files/IJCEM812001.pdf

Supplements of Alpha-lipoic acid, L-carnitine and Co-enzyme Q10 to restore mitrochondrial function http://articles.latimes.com/2008/aug/25/health/he-skeptic25

Scholarly articles on ALCAR treatment can be accessed at Mitochondrial.net, here.

One protocol in an individual with mitochondrial disease called for the following:
Alpha-lipoic Acid (ALA) 300 mg 2x/day
Co-Q-10 200 mg 2x/day
Creatine Monohydrate powder 2.5 gm 2x/day

Margot Kidder Battles Stigma

Natural Health article
Margot Kidder's
SEARCH FOR SANITY*

by Karen Dale Dustman

Margot Kidder made headlines as Lois Lane in the 1979 movie "Superman." In 1996, she hit the news again -- when she was discovered ragged and hungry in the backyard of a stranger's Glendale, Calif., home.

Convinced her former husband, writer Thomas McGuane, and the CIA were out to kill her, Kidder roamed the streets of Los Angeles for 1-1/2 weeks, eventually sharing food and a cardboard shack with a homeless man named Charlie. By the end of her delusional episode, the actress was almost unrecognizable. She had lost the caps on her front teeth, chopped off her long auburn hair, and swapped her Armani suit for a homeless man's dirty T-shirt and pants.

Kidder has bipolar disorder, a condition marked by alternating episodes of depression and mania. (The manic phase can produce psychotic symptoms as it did for Kidder.) Born in 1948 in Yellowknife, a mining town in Canada's Northwest Territory, she spent almost 20 years of her adult life seeking treatment. After her 1996 incident, Kidder realized the conventional therapies she was receiving weren't working.
Link

That article was written years ago.... Kidder has been well with orthomolecular medicine for FOURTEEN YEARS. Here is an article about Kidder from 2008.

The actor downplays the time in 1996 when she went missing for three days in Los Angeles and was taken to a psychiatric ward when found dishevelled, dazed and fearful in a stranger's backyard.
"If I were a cancer patient, I would today be considered cured," said Kidder, once diagnosed with bipolar disorder. "I haven't had an episode in 14 years."
Food allergies, the environment, air and water pollution, toxins, a vitamin deficiency, drugs, lack of sleep, low blood sugar and gastrointestinal damage can cause emotional problems, she said.
"The list goes on. Such things can cause mood swings, delusions and even people hearing voices.
"The reality is that you can have 10 people with manic depression and they can have 10 causes that cause their symptoms.
"Pharmaceutical companies make millions of dollars, but are only interested in producing drugs that dampen symptoms."
Link

Orthomolecular Nutrition to the Rescue!

Feeding Minds, Feeding Bodies
Written by Rosalie Moscoe
Monday, 29 December 2008


Orthomolecular Nutrition to the Rescue!

My husband and I waved goodbye as we watched our son John (not his real name) board the plane, happily joking with his buddies. The year was 1989. John was 19, and headed for what we expected to be a wonderful youth tour overseas; indeed, for the first few weeks he called home to say what a good time he was having. But after the fourth week, we received a shocking phone call. The trip organizers were sending him home. John had become paranoid and delusional; he had been taken to a hospital after fainting at the top of a mountain.
We left on the next plane and returned with a young man who not only looked physically ill and emaciated but also was totally psychotic. We were devastated.
John was hospitalized for a short time and was released with antipsychotic medication. The doctor told us it was “psychosis”. His personality changed. Our outgoing, friendly, affectionate boy and talented musician now spent hours in his room, asleep. Awake, he suffered Parkinson-like tremors and tardive dyskinesia, a side effect of his medication.
His progress was negligible and within a year, he was hospitalized with symptoms of schizophrenia. Upon his release, John was marginally better. Schizophrenia prognosis was dim. What was to become of him?
Frantically I searched for answers. Traditional texts left me feeling hopeless. By sheer luck, I came across a book by psychiatrist, Dr. Abram Hoffer, M.D. PhD., psychiatrist, and a scholar of bio-chemistry. The book (now renamed Healing Schizophrenia) discussed diets with healthy nutrients, free of allergens that could help his condition. (Hoffer is the author of 31 books and 500 research papers.)
Also emphasized were nutrition health benefits of nutrients in supplement form such as Vitamin B3 (niacin) and Vitamin C – both natural and essential to the human body for restoring health along with other nutrients.
Orthomolecular medicine is the practice of optimizing health and treating disease by providing correct amounts of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, enzymes, essential fatty acids and other substances which are natural to the body’s environment. In other words, find out what’s missing in the body and brain and give it what it needs and wants. Orthomolecular treatments are also safe to use along with medication.

Link

Antidepressants in the water? Don't try to make wine

Nowadays we hear a lot about antidepressants and other drug residues in water. Here's an unexpected side effect: Antidepressants kill yeast cell mitochondria. That's bad news for fans of wine and beer - or baking.

"Since the first mitochondrial dysfunction was described in the 1960s, the medicine has advanced in its understanding the role mitochondria play in health and disease. Damage to mitochondria is now understood to play a role in the pathogenesis of a wide range of seemingly unrelated disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disease, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, migraine headaches, strokes, neuropathic pain, Parkinson’s disease, ataxia, transient ischemic attack, cardiomyopathy, coronary artery disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, retinitis pigmentosa, diabetes, hepatitis C, and primary biliary cirrhosis. Medications have now emerged as a major cause of mitochondrial damage, which may explain many adverse effects. All classes of psychotropic drugs have been documented to damage mitochondria, as have stain medications, analgesics such as acetaminophen, and many others. While targeted nutrient therapies using antioxidants or their prescursors (e. g., N-acetylcysteine) hold promise for improving mitochondrial function, there are large gaps in our knowledge. The most rational approach is to understand the mechanisms underlying mitochondrial damage for specific medications and attempt to counteract their deleterious effects with nutritional therapies. This article reviews our basic understanding of how mitochondria function and how medications damage mitochondria to create their occasionally fatal adverse effects."
See this abstract.

What does your medication do to YOUR mitochondria?

Actual Cost of Making Popular Prescription Drugs

Actual Cost Of Making These Popular Prescription Drugs
Posted November 8, 2003 thepeoplesvoice.org

From Dr. Betty Martini
From JUDICIAL REFORM INVESTIGATIONS / justice@court.to

Did you ever wonder how much it costs a drug company for the Active ingredient in prescription medications? Some people think it must cost a lot, since many drugs sell for more than $2.00 per tablet. We did a search of offshore chemical synthesizers that supply the active ingredients found in drugs approved by the FDA. As we have revealed in past issues of Life Extension, a significant percentage of drugs sold in the United States contain active ingredients made in other countries.

In our independent investigation of how much profit drug companies really make, we obtained the actual price of active ingredients used in some of the most popular drugs sold in America. The chart
here speaks for itself.

Diagnosis: Greed

Sir William Osler

"About three decades ago, it became possible to make serious money as a university researcher. Not that the money was so bad before, of course. It was respectable. But it wasn’t Wall Street-type money.
That changed in the early 1980s with the passage of legislation that allowed universities to patent their publicly funded research results and then grant exclusive licenses to pharmaceutical companies. The public-private wall came down. The universities received royalties on the drugs, and the royalties were split between the researchers and the departments. Start-up companies were spun off and sold. University researchers became, essentially, partners to industry.

The change wasn’t just structural, however. There was a cultural shift, a kind of boundary melt.
“Greed became respectable,” Angell, a professor of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School and the former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, recalled. “There used to be a sort of tension between doing well and doing good for medical researchers. If they wanted to make a lot of money in a high-risk sort of job they could work for industry. If they wanted to do important, exciting research they stayed in academia and they had a comfortable life but not great wealth.

“Before 1980, they were aware of this tension,” she said. “Before 1980, those who went into industry were held in some disdain. With Reagan, all this changed. There was a strong feeling that the world divided into winners and losers. In medical research this just has had enormous implications.”

It’s had enormous implications for our world generally. On Wall Street, change had to come via catastrophe. Let’s hope it won’t take a disaster to bring sense back to medicine."

Article here.



Also see BLIND FAITH, a four-part series about Pharma blandishments in Academe, here.

Eli Lilly - Guilty!

Eli Lilly and Company Agrees to Pay $1.415 Billion to Resolve Allegations
of Off-label Promotion of Zyprexa
$515 Million Criminal Fine Is Largest Individual Corporate Criminal Fine in History; Civil
Settlement up to $800 Million
American pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Company today agreed to plead guilty and pay $1.415 billion for
promoting its drug Zyprexa for uses not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Department of
Justice announced today. This resolution includes a criminal fine of $515 million, the largest ever in a health care
case, and the largest criminal fine for an individual corporation ever imposed in a United States criminal
prosecution of any kind. Eli Lilly will also pay up to $800 million in a civil settlement with the federal government
and the states.
Eli Lilly agreed to enter a global resolution with the United States to resolve criminal and civil allegations that
it promoted its antipsychotic drug Zyprexa for uses not approved by the FDA, the Department said. Such
unapproved uses are also known as "off-label" uses because they are not included in the drug’s FDA approved
product label.
Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division Gregory G. Katsas and acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern
District of Pennsylvania Laurie Magid today announced the filing of a criminal information against Eli Lilly for
promoting Zyprexa for uses not approved by the FDA. Eli Lilly, headquartered in Indianapolis, is charged in the
information with promoting Zyprexa for such off-label or unapproved uses as treatment for dementia, including
Alzheimer’s dementia, in elderly people.
The company has signed a plea agreement admitting its guilt to a misdemeanor criminal charge. Eli Lilly also
signed a civil settlement to resolve civil claims that by marketing Zyprexa for unapproved uses, it caused false
claims for payment to be submitted to federal insurance programs such as Medicaid, TRICARE and the Federal
Employee Health Benefits Program, none of which provided coverage for such off-label uses.
Department of Justice document is here.

A deep bow of respect to investigative journalist Philip Dawdy, without whose dedication and personal sacrifices this result might never have been reached. Visit him at Furious Seasons.