In this video Dr. A, an integrative/naturopathic physician and researcher, explains five clinical patterns that may indicate mitochondrial dysfunction. He first defines mitochondrial slowdown as a contributor to energy production deficits and then outlines each warning sign: (1) chronic fatiguing syndromes such as CFS/ME, fibromyalgia, post‑cancer fatigue, or fatigue after major stressors; (2) brain fog, described as a sluggish, dopey mental state that can arise from trauma, chemotherapy, or idiopathic causes; (3) chronic pain, both central (brain‑mediated) and peripheral (muscle/joint) types, often co‑occurring with fatigue; (4) affective and neuropsychiatric disturbances—including worsening depression, anxiety, sleep problems, or other mood shifts—linked to imbalanced neurochemistry when mitochondria under‑perform; and (5) impaired cellular detoxification/elimination, where slowed mitochondria lead to accumulation of metabolic waste, toxins, and oxidants, contributing to systemic malaise. Dr. A emphasizes that these signs are not definitive proof of mitochondrial disease but are useful flags for integrative clinicians to consider “tuning up” mitochondrial function in a follow‑up video. The presentation ends with standard YouTube calls to action.
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This one specifically is, how would I know my mitochondria are damaged? What would tell me that I might have some mitochondrial problems going on? Hey, I'm Dr. A. Welcome to the channel. I've been involved in research and teaching in the integrative and naturopathic medical space for 30 years, and I use this channel as a platform to answer questions. So getting right to it, what would be my top 5 reasons to be concerned? Now, there's many others, So let's just go through the top 5. The first would be anybody who has a chronic fatiguing syndrome. Now, that could be the diagnosis of CFS/ME. That could be a patient with fibromyalgia. That could be somebody with some other chronic illness that has chronic fatigue related to it. Could be somebody who is recovering from cancer and now they have chronic fatigue. Could be somebody who has never better sensed a stressor. Like a car accident, a brain trauma, a surgery, something like that. So anything that creates chronic fatigue, the way you feel to a large extent, not 100%, but to a large extent, as far as your energy goes, is the sum total of your mitochondrial activity, not just in your brain, but in all your muscles, your digestive organs, everywhere, your body, right? So chronic fatigue, there's always a component, not all of it, but component that is mitochondrial damage, mitochondrial slowdown. The next one that's very common is brain fog. And if you've never had brain fog, you might not understand the term, but it's just what it says. My brain just feels slow. I've had patients say, I feel dopey, feel tired, feel sluggish, like I'm working through mud, et cetera. So the symptom of brain fog. Now, it's not uncommon to have brain fog and a chronic fatiguing illness together, but you can have it separately too. Well, your brain has some of the most mitochondrially dense cells in it. And if you think about it, your brain does everything that you are able to perceive and it operates the rest of your body. So if those mitochondria are slow at all, you may have a feeling that you're unable to think or process exactly like you would want to. Now, this could come from a known reason, like a traumatic brain injury. You hit your head good. It could come from brain surgery. It could come from chemotherapy or other drug therapies. But some people will just come on with a brain fog that's just progressive and they're Unsure why. Well, one of the reasons we wanna look at would be some kind of mitochondrial dysfunction, mitochondrial damage. The next one would be chronic pain. Now, again, just like chronic fatigue, chronic pain is not 100% mitochondrial damage, but if you consider you can have either a central pain syndrome, which comes from the pain generating and sensing areas in your brain, and/or a peripheral pain syndrome where your muscles just ache all the time, for example, or maybe your joints ache all the time. Yeah. time, or maybe everything aches all the time. So it can be a mixture. Now, we already talked under brain fog about how sensitive the brain is to these things. So central pain can have a component of mitochondrial damage, but also peripheral chronic pain. People— and again, crosses over— people with chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, other chronic illnesses often have chronic pain. And yes, the only reason is not your mitochondria, but until they are made to work more at an appropriate speed and level, they're not going to help out working So chronic pain. Number four, affective problems, neuropsychiatric problems, etc. Might be aggravations of depression, could be aggravations of anxiety, aggravations of sleep disturbance. When mitochondria are a reason for neuro or neuropsychiatric symptoms being more noticeable, the reason is. Not necessarily that, you know, those areas that create the brain chemistry to help me not be as anxious or whatever have specific mitochondrial damage. They might, but it's usually not that. It's more that the way I feel as a human, but then maybe expressed, or maybe I don't tell anybody, but I feel it as I'm more depressed or I'm more anxious or I have more sleep trouble or I have other things going on. The more my brain is stressed, And the worse the mitochondria are performing, the more the balance of neurochemistry, which is very, very dynamic, gets imbalanced. And everybody has imbalances that are under their subthreshold. They're under the radar. But if I stress the brain enough, they may become suprathreshold above the radar. And so I might tend to get a little down more than other people or something like that. But, you know, I don't qualify as being depressed or I wouldn't think of myself as depressed. But if I get enough mitochondrial dysfunction and my brain modulation is not able to, you know, modulate appropriately cuz mitochondria are not kicking in like they're supposed to, then my subthreshold feeling down a lot will turn into maybe a depression. Just one example. Could be a sleep problem, could be anxiety, could be a million things, but that's the other one. And what would the 5th one be? And this one is a little bit harder because it gives me other symptoms. I don't necessarily feel this as a primary problem. So I have to be careful with this. But number 5 is impaired detoxification. And you might say, oh God, you know, everybody on the internet talks about detox and all this. Well, what I'm talking about is the actual process that's built into mammalian physiology to keep us alive. And there are 2 technical terms, but we usually jam them together into one term we call detoxification, but impaired elimination. There are processes in your body that are called depuration, and then there are processes in your body called detoxification, and they have different sort of medical implications. But for the sake of fun, we'll just call them elimination or detox. Built into the way that your cells work, and right in the middle of this process I'm about to describe, sit your mitochondria. So built into the way your cells work, there is not only a way to have cell respiration so that oxygen goes in and carbon dioxide comes out, but also Good things like nutrients go in and feed the cell organelles and the cell membrane and the mitochondria and help you run the mitochondria and make energy. But what happens then? If I do respiration with my lungs, I breathe good things in and I breathe some bad stuff out. Well, cell respiration, I take all these good things in, I have to have bad things go out. If my mitochondria slow down, I build up cellular metabolic garbage. Some categorize as toxins, some are just irritants, some are buildups of oxidant Some are other things that we don't like. So if the mitochondria are damaged, slowed down, whatever euphemism you want to use, a slowdown in the ability to move the garbage out of the cells occurs. Now that, as I say, generally we don't wake up one morning and think, oh, I'm not cellularly respiring as well, and I'm not moving the garbage out like I ought to. But that does build up over time. And there's actually research now a lot in the cancer world looking at movement of, you know, immune cells and chemotherapy and all kinds of other That really backs this concept up. It's not like it automatically happens and it's always perfect. The slower your mitochondria are, the more backup you're going to have, and then that will make you feel whatever way that's going to make you feel. So we got chronic fatigue, brain fog, depression, anxiety, other affective problems, chronic pain, and then slowdowns in elimination of toxins, toxicants, et cetera, none of which are good for you. So these all be reasons why your integrative healthcare provider, your naturopathic doctor, whoever may say, you know, okay, you don't have a genetic Mitochondrial problem, but maybe we need to just work on tuning up your mitochondria. Well, how might we tune up the mitochondria? We're going to do that in a separate video. Thank you, new subscribers. Like, share, subscribe. Do the notifications if you haven't. Let your friends know, and I will see you all on the next video.
