Gary Brecka and a clinician discuss mast cell activation syndrome, a condition affecting up to 20% of people that can cause allergies, IBS, anxiety, and fatigue. They found 100% of their PCOS patients also have MCAS, suggesting the conditions are linked. Mast cells release inflammatory chemicals without external triggers, affecting the gut and immune system across multiple body systems.
Right now in my practice, 100% of patients with PCOS have mast cell activation syndrome.
Up to 17 to 20% of the population may have mast cell syndrome and not know it. It mimics dozens of other conditions: allergies, IBS, anxiety, chronic fatigue, skin issues.
Mast cell activation syndrome, it's a chronic inflammatory multi-system condition. Everyone has mast cells. Mast cells are your frontline of your immune system. They're helping us, but they can also damage us.
They're chemical messengers, and when their system is faulty, they can chronically secrete these without an invasion as if one was occurring.
Let's look at the root and understand, you know, that the mast cells are affecting the motility. They're causing inflammation in the gut. They're making it more difficult to tolerate certain foods.
This is such a fascinating, underserved area of medicine where we start really looking at root causes and how symptoms don't necessarily link back to the pathology that people are diagnosed with. It may be something even deeper.
But also, I want to give hope because I think there's so much that we we can do. And that's why I do the work that I do, because I help people every day.
For someone that's watching this, what would be some of the category of potential symptoms or ailments, right, that they would be suffering from, where you would say this might be at the root of that?
I always think about it as 3 themes that we see very commonly in people who have this. One is in
