Matt Kelly explains autoimmune disease stems from genetics, chronic infections like Epstein-Barr and Lyme disease, and environmental toxins like mold. Reversal is possible but depends on how long you've had it, your autoantibody levels, and how many triggers you're exposed to. Recent onset with low titers and fewer triggers gives you the best shot.
Autoimmune disease is a very disturbing diagnosis to get, and it's always one where people want to know, is this something I am going to have the rest of my life? Is it guaranteed to progress and get worse? Is there anything at all we can do about autoimmunity? And is there any way I don't have to carry this with me for the rest of my life? Let's get into that. So a very common situation when you have patients who are in the chronic illness space is that they may have 1, 2, 3, 4 diagnoses, maybe more, and then they're not getting better. You do more laboratory testing, or maybe they've seen a specialist somewhere and they got some other laboratory testing and they're now diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. And it's very disturbing because an autoimmune disorder means that your immune system is picking part of you to attack. So if it's picking your synovial membranes, you develop rheumatoid arthritis. If it's picking parts of your nervous system, you develop multiple sclerosis, et cetera, et cetera. Nothing that anybody wants to have happen, but also very, very common in the chronically ill patient. So the next step in question about this would be, is there anything I can do to not have this autoimmunity? And the answer always is maybe. The reason why the answer is maybe is that there's a lot of ways that we feed into the creation of autoimmunity in the body. And the more of those we can undo, the more we can either decrease the amount of autoimmune reactivity or maybe make it go away, depending on how many things we can affect and how much we affect your body. So let's walk through that and see what that spectrum would look like from, we can't really make this go away, but maybe we can make it a bit better, to, we've got it here, but maybe we can make it reverse and go away. 2 kind of very different things, but they're on a spectrum, as many things in medicine are. So the first thing to think about with autoimmunity is there are a number of roads into autoimmunity forming in a human. One road is genetic, and that doesn't mean that if you have certain genes, you're always going to develop autoimmunity in that area, but you're going to be more likely to develop autoimmunity. So the genetic portion is not something we can affect directly, but what we can affect are the epigenetics, or epi is around, around those genes that might either protect and turn them off or slow them down. So that's the genetic part. Then there are all of the stimulating or fuel on the fire parts that go along. And the important part with that is they might be from a number of different points on the compass coming towards your immune system to scramble your immune response So your immune system suddenly believes you're the enemy, and that's obviously a bad thing. Now, what is one example that has been in the news that is what we would call a de novo or a brand new cause of autoimmunity? And that is in patients who have been diagnosed with long COVID or post-acute COVID syndrome, where they never had autoimmunity before, but now they're diagnosed with new autoimmunity. Well, What is it about a viral infection that would engender an autoimmune response in a patient? Well, just because COVID is so famous and talked about, it got a lot of press, but we have seen this for years and years and years in the medical literature where autoimmunity and chronic infections are linked together. COVID just happens to be very aggressive in confusing the immune system, and so it created a lot more of this. More eyes were on COVID Patients, more eyes were on long COVID patients. But I can guarantee you, having dealt for 3 decades with chronically ill people before COVID that all of our patients with chronic viral, chronic bacterial, and other infections were also more likely to develop autoimmunity. So simply making the infection go away does not make the autoimmunity go away in most cases, but it doesn't hurt. So working on chronic infections, working on long COVID, working on lung, any other infectious problem, Epstein-Barr, Lyme, Etc. All very, very useful. What's another big trigger to the immune system getting very confused? Environmental toxicants and toxins. These could be metals, they could be the various chemicals we're exposed to, and they could be biotoxins. The most common of which are mycotoxins or mold-induced biotoxins that are poisoning to the body. All of these, whether metal, chemical, or biotoxin, have the ability to scramble the immune system, get it confused. And contribute again to autoimmunity. Many, many other things we could go down, listen, listen, listen of all of the things that can do it. Those are just some of the examples. So then what do we tell the patient who's in front of us who says, I have this diagnosed autoimmunity, can you make it go away? The normal advice that I give the patient is we can do something in the spectrum, which I mentioned earlier, of make it less of an impact and better, but you're still going to have some, or maybe Maybe you reverse it and make it go away, which I've seen in many, many, many cases. What are the things that feed into which end of the spectrum we go to? First thing is how long have they had it? Next thing is how high are their titers, their autoantibody titers? If they've had it a long time, 5, 10, 15, 20 years, going to be harder, but we can make it better. If their antibody titers are just barely up, going to be easier to reverse. Antibody titers really high for 5, 10, 15, 20 years, going to be tougher. We can knock those down a little bit. Next thing is how many How many roads in are there? Is there a genetic component and a couple of toxic components and an infectious component and component XYZ? We're going to have a bigger job. Is there mostly some kind of weak gene things going on and one chronic infection? It's going to be an easier job. And I've seen it go all different ways. The more there is to deal with, the more work it is to undo the problem. The less there is to deal with, the less triggers, the easier it is to undo the problem. So autoimmunity is not always a for sure forever sentence. It can last forever. It can be mitigated to be less of an issue. And in some people it can be reversed into a non-issue and the labs will go back to be normal and the patient will not be experiencing the signs and symptoms of the autoimmunity. I know that's not a linear single answer, but it's the truth and it's the way these things work out. I'm really glad for that question. 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