HISTAMINE INTOLERANCE: Symptoms, Root Causes, and Treatment

Today I wanted to cover what does it look like that might lead you to maybe seek some medical help in regard to histamine intolerance? So what would your symptoms be? What kind of reactions would you be having, et cetera? And then where does that come from? So what would be the trigger? Why, you know, what would be the reason behind my histamine intolerance? And then although we have lots of information about treatment, we'll just go through some of the top-down sort of treatments that are available. Hi, I'm Dr. A. We answer healthcare questions, especially in the complex chronic illness space on this channel. Let's get into today's topic, which is histamine intolerance. So the first thing is when you have histamine intolerance, it's a lot like having allergic phenomenon. So there's a lot of crossover because histamine is part of the trigger to allergy. It's a lot like having mast cell activation disorders because histamine is one of the things that comes out of the mast cell family of cells. It's inflammatory. But sometimes they're not all the same thing. So the histamine portion is when the body technically has trouble breaking the histamine down and getting rid of the histamine. So if histamine intolerance is that I have too much histamine because it's not leaving the body, then that must mean that in some way or another, I'm going to wind up having something maybe either triggering the histamine or, as we say, not allowing it to leave, or a little bit of both. Before we get into that too much, which is basically a balance problem, your body makes histamine every day. It's used in your body to keep your brain working. It's used in your body as a signaling molecule, et cetera. So histamine is not always a bad thing and it's not always something you want to totally erase out of the body, but when there's too much, it can be a problem. What would be signs and symptoms? Now, most people would say, well, it's pretty obvious, isn't it, that you would have like hives or rashes or itching on your Skin or something like that? The answer is certainly you can get hives, flushing, eczema, other rashes, itchy skin, all of that stuff. Skin is a big one. Also, people might say, well, obviously we're going to have respiratory problems. You could get stuffy nose, scratchy throat, cough, wheezing, those sort of things. Certainly all of those come along with histamine intolerance, but also there's other areas. Your digestive tract uses histamine as a signaling chemical, and so histamine in either Too much or too little can cause some digestive dysfunction, and it can do this through a number of ways that we really don't have time to get into. But just think of they can either be both directly because the histamine is telling a cell or part of a cell to do something, or indirectly where there's an inflammatory situation that's creating some other downstream digestive problem. You can, with histamine intolerance, have things like gas and bloating. You can have abdominal pain. You can have either diarrhea or constipation. Or an alternating between the two. You can have nausea, vomiting, just about any symptom your digestive tract can have could be related to histamine intolerance. Also, we think about the respiratory system with histamine, but you don't often think about cardiovascular effects. You can have histamine-induced blood pressure changes, usually low blood pressure. You can have histamine-induced dizziness, which could be related to the blood pressure shifts or other things. You can have histamine-induced palpitations. And if If you have certain types of dysrhythmias or arrhythmias and you get a histamine intolerance, you might wind up with an aggravation of your dysrhythmia, which I've seen in some people as well. Your neurological system can also be aggravated. So I said in the beginning, one of the things histamine does is to help kind of keep your brain working. It's used as a cross-reacting neurotransmitter. So it's helping, you know, one system maintain and talk to the other system in the brain or stay balanced. It's very complex the way histamine works in the brain. So it's not in the brain, it's not so much about, you know, respiratory problems and stuff, it's about actually how your brain functions. Now, if you've ever taken an antihistamine drug, if it was one that is what they call the sedating kind, like let's say Benadryl, you probably noticed you got really tired when you took the antihistamine. Well, the reason for that is if I block the histamine type 1 receptors in your brain, then the brain neuroconductivity is going to slow down and you'll actually get tired. There are at least 4 places and ways that histamine binds and reacts in your brain. Like I say, it's a very complex thing, but all of this to say that you can have direct and indirect effects of histamine on the neurological system. So you could have a fatiguing state by an imbalance in histamine. You could actually trigger anxiety. We see this with people where they have an allergic response or histamine intolerance and their anxiety levels will rise, or you might have sleep disturbance. Remember if I Take an antihistamine of certain types. I'm going to probably sleep more. Well, if I have too much histamine, I may sleep less. Right? You might have irritability. You might have jumpiness. You could even get headaches from histamine, etc. So there's lots of things that it does around the body. You also can get things such as joint pain, muscle aching and pain, and sensitivity to other things because I'm just too full of histamine. So again, without going too deeply into the root causes, histamine intolerance and triggering can. Come from a number of areas. One would be direct triggering from outside substances. So that could be the pollen you're allergic to. That could be mold spores or something like that. That could be to particular foods that you didn't know are histamine triggering for you. That could be due to particular other conditions where your histamine levels will go up. You also can have hypersensitivity of the histamine system, mentioned this on the front end, such as in mast cell disorders, mast cell activation problems, where the mast cells, which are immune cells of different families that help to make inflammatory components, put out too much histamine. That also can happen. So like I said, there can be a crossover with mast cell activation and histamine intolerance. So that's the supply side, too much. And then the other side is not a fast enough elimination of the histamine. So if I am not eliminating histamine as I should, and then I have any triggering for histamine at all, I'm going to keep it in my body. And then all those symptoms we talk about could potentially happen to you. So really the root cause is wherever it's coming from. And then also the fact that the body's not breaking it down. Now, as far as treatments, there's different levels of treatment. So the first level of treatment would be safety. So let's say you have highly reactive, high histamine levels, and it's creating you to have an allergic or anaphylactic type reaction. If it's real bad, you might get something like epinephrine. Right? Adrenaline. You may be given steroids. You certainly would be given antihistamines. If you ever had allergic reaction, you go into the doctor, into the hospital, probably been given antihistamines. So that's sort of on the safety end. On the preventive so-called end, if you're having a lot of problems, say with hives and itching, doesn't go to the big level of anaphylaxis, but you're still having allergic reaction, your doctor may put you on any number of things, but one would often be a combination of the first and second type of histamine receptor blocker. Blocker, the antihistamines. They'll usually give a combination there. There's also treatments that could slow down the release of histamine. So remember we said the mast cells are one of the cell types that release histamine. Mast cell calming agents such as the drug chromolin—that's one. The bioflavonoids from the plant kingdom is another way to calm down the release, etc. So the drug treatments generally are aimed at either stopping the inflammation or stopping the secondary problems like the cardiorespiratory. issues or blocking the receptors. In the middle of all that are eliminatory pathways. And what we're going to do at the end is link you to some other histamine content where we get into the eliminatory pathways and how those are run more by nutrients and nutrient support areas. So again, histamine intolerance, we've got not enough breaking down of histamine, usually too much supply, and that imbalance creates a depot or a backup of histamine inside the body. And then that leads to any number of symptoms, kind of wherever you're constitutionally going to feel it. They can be all neurological, they can be all cardiac, they can be all respiratory, on and on and on. Or you can get a little bit of all of the above. All right. Love answering these questions. And like I say, we'll put up some other histamine content here at the end. Go to the main channel and we've got tons of histamine content on there and dealing with mast cell problems, et cetera. I'm Dr. A. Please do like, share, and subscribe, and I'll I'll see you guys on the next video.