6 Most MISUNDERSTOOD Causes of MCAS (MAST CELL SYNDROME)

Guess what? All of, all of this effector chemistry and biology and everything, when you throw toxic material in your body, a lot of those output chemicals are going to be very pro inflammatory. They're going to fuel the fire of the mast cell problem. What are the six top areas that we like to look when mast cell activation or mast cell disease patients are just not getting better? There's a big number of areas that must be looked at when you are dealing with mast cell activation problems. You have to consider both the base chemistry problems such as histamine Release, inflammatory mediators, etc. And then you have to consider the entire body and what it's doing to either help or harm the mast cell activation issues. So while these are certainly not the only places, these are the most common places that we wind up looking. Number one being hormonal imbalances, hormone issues. Number two being toxicity and toxicity issues. Number three being chronic infections, especially those that we don't know that we have. Number four being your digestive tract. Number five being your immune system generally. And number six being food. Because food can either bring in a lot of things that help or sometimes aggravate the process. And we don't even know that. So let's break these down a little bit. Why are we talking about these other body areas when it comes to mast cell disease, mast cell activation? It's because as many people have commented on some of the videos on YouTube, you know, while I'm doing all the histamine stuff and I took those, you know, even those drugs for mast cell or whatever and I'm still, I still have problems. Well, here's the biggest issue. Your mast cells are part of the inflammatory immunomodulatory system in your body and they affect everything, but they're also affected by almost everything as well. And not that certainly this is going to be the best thing in the world graphically if you're watching on the video. But this is a four quadrant map that I made for students to look at not only mast cells, but eosinophils based basophils and immunoglobulin E who all collude to create mast cell activation. So we blame the poor mast cells because they got famous, but really there's a whole host of cells in chemical products coming out. Well, if you look at that map, so it' so there's triggering releases and then effector releases and then the actual cell triggers at the, at the bottom in the core, there's a lot of crossover in there. What's the other Crossover. The other crossover is all these other parts of your body that just are not working well. And it's not that they're maybe causing your mast cell problems, but they're like fueling the fire. So you can be taking all this stuff to deal with your histamine. You can be doing, you know, maybe medications or natural stuff to help calm your mast cells. You're still going to have all this churning going on inside of your body in these six areas. What I want to take a look at here quickly, I'm going to summarize why each one of these is important. So the first one being hormonal imbalances. So when we get a case like this where we have to kind of step back and open up our minds, the first thing that we start to do is we look at the adrenal cortisol output, do a morning blood test for that. There's other tests for it. We look at the balance between estrogens, androgens like testosterone and DHEA and progesterone in men and women. Very critical. And often the reproductive hormones, we think, well, they're reproductive. They're not going to have to do with my immune system. They have a ton to do with your immune system. So we got cortisol in the adrenals, we've got the reproductive set. Then we've got thyroid, but also not just thyroid as in hypothyroid, but thyroid autoimmunity like in Hashimoto's, and also thyroid resistance like in reverse T3. We've talked about that on a lot of the other things. And then there's other related hormones which can be very, very inflammatory. We don't sometimes think about such as those related to insulin. So insulin is a very inflammatory part of our hormonal system. And it's doing its job with sugar, it's one thing, but when it's in excess, it becomes very inflammatory. A lot of people with mast cell issues have a lot of insulin regulatory problems. So you look at that whole suite of hormonal things, very, very critical toxicities. And usually the big three areas are going to be mold, mycotoxins, which would be. If you're only a check for one thing, I would check for mold, mycotoxins, but also chemical toxins, including glyphosate and other chemicals. And then number three would be metal toxins. Why are these toxicities such a problem? Well, number one, they're in your body. They're not supposed to be there. Your body's trying to metabolize them away. Guess what? All of all of this effector chemistry and biology and everything. When you throw a toxic material in your body, a lot of those output chemicals are going to be very pro inflammatory. They're going to fuel the fire of the mast cell problem. And so it's very important at some point to assess the level of toxicity and work on it. The next is your gut. And your gut is an area where you not only have your GI nervous system and your GI immune system, which are very critical to how everything operates. Mast cells, eosinophils, basophils, IgE biology, that all is very, very critical in the GI tract too. But your GI tract can be a resident area for parasites, worms in some people, bacteria and viruses that just shouldn't be there. They're not like the beneficial kind. All of that can increase the triggering molecules that make your mast cell worse. Also, you can build a lot of biofilms in the GI tract and you to need, need to work on those often in these more complex cases. And then there's a whole bunch of other things like overgrowth syndromes, like small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, small intestinal fungal overgrowth, and it all goes together. And a lot of times people will say, well, I don't have any digestive symptoms. It's like, that's great. But sometimes you can have a lot of dysfunction in your GI tract and not realize it because it's been there so long. So again, just like with the hormones, if you don't look, you don't find it. Infections are huge. Now, you could in modern times, here, currently, Covid's the infection everyone's worried about. And certainly Covid, there's research now on Covid being a mast cell trigger. But that's most viral infections, most chronic infections. If you already have Epstein Barr, cytomegalovirus or Covid, or you've got chronic Lyme complex or other chronic infections, they are just going to sit there and again, shovel fuel onto the fire for your mast cell disorder of whatever kind. Remember, it's a spectrum. We've got mast cell activation problems, mast cell disorders, mast cell diseases, they're all going to be a problem. But infections including Covid are something. And again, if you don't look, we will say, well, I don't feel like I have an infection. A lot of people have these resident infections that are just sitting there like poking at their immune system all the time and they really don't have a lot of symptoms from them. So if you're not getting answers with mast Cell, it's another place to look. Then there's the immune system. Now, mast cell activation is intimately connected with the way your immune system runs. And so that means that if I have autoimmunity, where my immune system is attacking part of me, or I have allergy or atopic problems, where, again, my body's having immune responses to things inappropriately, that's what allergy and atopic problems are super connected to. Mast cell problems. But also cancer. There's a couple of forms of mast cell disease that are actually cancers, and that goes both ways. If you already have cancer and your immunology is imbalanced, it's similar, not the same, to having autoimmunity imbalance. So this is why we check for things like autoimmune, thyroid problems. We screen people for general autoimmunity to make sure there's not an autoimmune process we don't know about going on. We look at all of the other things that have to do with the immune system. Very, very important. And then foods. So there's a whole lot of ways this can happen. Now, we talked about the gut, how important that is. You can have foods that you're just sensitive. You're not allergic, you're just sensitive to. When you're. When you eat them, they tend to trigger your immune system in your gut. And that just triggers the mast cells and the base fills the eosinophils and other stuff. Very, very critical there. You know, you can have food allergies, which will trigger the same sorts of things. You can then be eating things that have high levels of chemicals that you just don't tolerate Right now, the three big ones that you can look at, and you can look at online diets that show you what's high and low in these things. But histamine, we talked about that on a previous section. A low histamine diet can be very helpful, especially in the beginning. Salicylates. You hear about salicylate as part of, like, aspirin. Well, there's high salicylate foods and then oxalate foods. So oxalate, salicylate and histamine. Now, it's not always practical to remove everything, but you can take a look online and look at what the high histamine, salicylate, and oxalate foods are, and then see what you can do to work around them in your diet. Because it's like taking a break off. Well, it's not going to cure you, but it's one less thing. Thing for your body to be stressed by and deal with much like the infections or much like the hormonal problems, etc. So this all reminds me, you know, of, of this 48 year old female patient we had with muscle activation syndrome. And she was doing all the appropriate stuff, you know, the histamine support. And she was on a couple of medications and everything targeted kind of at that, you know, inflammatory immune biology I was talking about with the ige and the basophils and the eosinophils and the mast cells, all that little family there. So that part was being targeted, but it's like nothing was settling it down. Although she got some symptomatic relief. So we took a step back and we looked at, okay, can we get more specific with histamine. Turned out she wasn't really doing anything to support fully all three pathways. So we did that with, with nutritional supplements basically. And you can go look at the histamine ones and we'll talk about that in there. Also we checked and she had this collusion of things going on where she had some mold toxins, mold toxicity she had been exposed to, her hormones were really imbalanced. And then it turned out she had some, some GI parasite activity going on combined with a chronic Epstein Barr infection. And once we were able, and this is not slow, it's not microwave medicine, this took a long time. In some cases it can take six months, a year, two years, can take many years because there's so many things going wrong. But if you don't start, you never get, you know, to work on it. So we started working on these things piece by piece and supporting the body. And we did put her on a lower histamine diet and we had her, you know, kind of go through the salicylate and the oxalate foods and make sure she wasn't on any real high ones there. And again, the food thing, once you're feeling better, you can eat more stuff, but initially just takes, takes a brick off the load. Well, over the course of many months she started to get better. And as, as the gut things cleared, as the chronic infections got better, and as we helped her detox from the mycotoxins, the mold toxins, and we worked on the hormone stuff, her body started to kind of crawl out of the hole a baby step at a time. And that's really important to keep in mind that that can happen. Well, we're out of time for this section on some of the top mast cell activation triggers that I personally see clinically. Remember, this isn't Megalo advice. See your own healthcare providers for that. This is information for you and a lot of background just from our practice. Please whatever whatever way you are consuming this, obviously you're hearing me somehow. Podcast pod burners, YouTube like share, subscribe, do notifications and please comment. That helps us a lot with the algorithm and we're getting back into good graces with the algorithm so we want to keep going in that direction. Check out the hub website dranow.com d r a n O W that will take you to places that you might not know exist such as our newsletter area, our links to YouTube and our links to the other media outlets etc and some clinician stuff there and also if you haven't gone checked out the YouTube channel, we're building that community. Would love it if you would subscribe over there at YouTube too. But I'm Dr. Paul Anderson and I will see you all in the next.