Short YouTube video by Dr. Nicole Cain (May 10, 2024) explaining histamine’s role in immunity and as a fast-acting neurotransmitter. The speaker emphasizes that elevated histamine is linked to systemic inflammation and CNS symptoms (anxiety, sleep and concentration problems, cardiovascular and gut effects). A key practical point: plasma histamine tests are unreliable (degrades in ~10 seconds) and clinicians should instead measure urinary histamine metabolites (labs: SonoraQuest, LabCorp). The video also promotes a related lesson in the Holistic Wellness Collective.
Chapters
I'm prepping for a summit that I'm talking at about histamine. And in a lot of the papers that are coming out in the past three years, we are finding that humans are more inflamed right now than we have been in history. Have you heard about histamine? Histamine is a chemical that your immune system releases. And what you might not know is that histamine can be as stimulating and excitatory in your nervous system as adrenaline. You need histamine in order to be healthy and to get immune system activation. But what happens when histamine overreacts you? You can end up with system wide symptoms, symptoms in the brain and central nervous system like anxiety or panic or confusion or issues with sleeping or concentrating. You can get symptoms in your heart and in your gut and your blood vessels, your vasculature, your lymphatic system. But here's a big problem that you might not know and also that your doctor might not know. Histamine neurotransmitter in the brain degrades incredibly rapidly. So testing it in the brain is super difficult. Also, don't test plasma histamine. I can't say this enough. Don't test plasma histamine. It degrades in like 10 seconds. And so you're going to get so many false negatives, you're not going to get the information that you need. Instead, you're going to want to look for histamine metabolites in the urine, which you can do with SonoraQuest or LabCorp. We have a whole lesson on histamine in the Holistic Wellness Collective. So definitely check out the link in the bio.