A short YouTube lecture by Dr. Nicole Cain explaining monoamine oxidase (MAO): an enzyme that degrades neurotransmitters (adrenaline, serotonin, histamine) and how MAO malfunction can cause neurotransmitter buildup leading to anxiety. The speaker recommends genetic testing to assess MAO-related risk but stresses genetics aren’t deterministic, and introduces biohacking strategies to improve MAO function and address anxiety at the root.
Chapters
Monoamine oxidase. What is it and how can it be affecting your mental health? If you haven't seen my other video about mao, be sure to check it out because it'll give a little bit more clarity to this video. MAO is an enzyme that's involved in degrading certain neurotransmitters in your brain, like adrenaline, serotonin, histamine. If this enzyme isn't working correctly, you can end up with a buildup of these chemicals in your nervous system. For example, buildup of catecholamines like adrenaline can make you feel extremely anxious. So what you want to do next is identify if you are at risk for having MAO enzyme malfunctions. The best way to do that is through genetic testing. One thing to keep in mind with genetics is just because you may have a genetic SNP or a mutation, it doesn't mean that that's how it's going to behave or how you're going to feel. So perhaps you are dealing with a lot of anxiety. And let's say that you do do the genetic test and it turns out that you do have a SNP or a mutation at mao. That doesn't mean that you doomed to always have anxiety. We can biohack your genes, which means that if your body isn't very good at making MAO and then you get an accumulation of adrenaline making you anxious, there are strategies that you can learn to actually help that gene work better to combat anxiety at the root. And we're teaching about this a lot here.
