Thyroid Madness

Apparently, thyroid and adrenal dysfunction could be two major contributors to high depression rates and could as well have a connection with high cholestrol.

T3, the active thyroid metabolite hormone, have numerous receptors all over the body. Thyroid hormones regulate the efficiacy and availability of other hormones and signal substances in the body, for example, it has an important role in regulating serotonine, noradrenaline and GABA. These are three hormones that control mostly anxiety and attention, and one could fairly easily imagine that dysregulation of those could contribute to depression.

Cortisol, a hormone produced in the adrenal gland, regulates stress responses, as well as the activity of thyroid hormones. If you have trouble falling asleep at night, and even greater trouble getting up, cortisol could the problem.

Cortisol is usually highest in the morning and afternoon, but in a lot of depressed people, the fluctuations are absent, or have gone haywire. Some have constantly high cortisol level, and it is believed to be not just a symptom, but a co-cause of depression.

Of course, these changes occur in people who face environmental stress, such as loss or trauma, but within the body, neurological changes can be caused by environmental as well as chemical reasons.

Tingle in your Tummy

Necator Americanus larvae at 400x magnification. These are small suckers.

You can have some if you want to, for only like 3.800$ you can have you own colony of intestine parasites. The advantage? You could get rid of nasty allergies, astma, myelic enchepalitus, multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, certain forms of autism, crohns disease and a whole range of so called autoimmune diseases.

What used to be called the "hygiene hypothesis", which was based on the finding that these autoimmune diseases rarely occur in less developed countries, where the plethora of infectious diseases is abundant.

The former theory was that the immune defense had to be "imprinted" by being affected by lots of different diseases to "learn" which cells to attack (diseases) and which to save (your body and everything that isn't a pathogen).

Lately however, the scientists have found that autoimmune diseases are commonly caused by a lack of regulatory T-cells, a certain kind of white blood cell that keeps the immune defense in order, so that it won't attack friendly cells.

What they also found is that certain parasites, in order to survive inside the environment of the human body, have developed different ways to regulate the production of regulatory T-cells.
By downregulationg the immune system in this way, the parasites can survive inside the human body long enough to complete their life cycle and lay eggs to a new generation of parasites.

Throughout the milleniums that these parasites have coexisted with mankind, our immune system and the parasites immune-downregulatory effects have adapted to each other. This means that without these parasites, some people's immune defense will be inherantly upregulated, resulting in a too easily-aggravated immune response in face of certain diseases and allergens.

There is a lot of research in this area, but some people are too eager to reap the fruits of this newfound research, so instead of waiting for (patented) medical treatments to surface, they decided to infect themselves with certain parasites, and even start businesses to help other get infected by these parasites.

One example is Jasper Lawrence, who after several years of handicapping asthma, finally was relieved of his symptoms by infection from the intestinal parasite Americanus Nemator. Which ultimately resulted in the business http://autoimmunetherapies.com/, in Tijuana, Mexico, where you too can get infected by your very own hookworm colony. The worms live up to around 12 months, when they die and you need reinfection for the benefits to continue.

Of course, the treated will suffer from a down-regulated immune defense, with possibly all the other side effects that might rise from that, but then again, the usual treatments for autoimmune diseases have even more severe effects on the immune defense, and several other uncomfortable side-effects as well.

Once further research has been done, the scientists might be able to separate the proteins or other substances accountable for the upregulation of regulatory T-cells, and make that into a medicine for people suffering from autoimmune diseases. But right now, parasite infection is the only way to go if you want some up-regulating-T-Cell-regulating-action.

The stuff in your head and other stories

This is a great book. Peter D. Kramer writes a follow-up on his first hit book Listening to Prozac that came out in like -93 or something. Against Depression came out in 2005 and is just as a good sequel should be: more of everything. He writes about the latest new findings in neuropsychiatry and makes the statement that could be simplified as that the brain is like, perhaps like your spine: If you put a lot of stress on it it will get damaged and it will not be as strong as before.

That's the case with depression, prolonged stress causes excitotoxoligical effects on your neurons so they die... This means that there will be less brain mass to help you cope with stress in the future, which means that the same stress factors will cause more stress on you than it used to before the damage.

This also leads to a decline in all the feel-good neurotransmitting substances in your brain like serotonin, noradrenaline and dopamine. These signal substances will have less effect than before, which means, fun things won't "feel as fun" as they used to. The damage also fucks up your immune system by dysregulation of the HPA-axis, which is involved in immune regulation.

The damage is reversible but takes time to heal, and that's when you take antidepressants, they stop the damaging effects of stress (and lessens stress in itself too).

Anyways, enough of that. The good thing about these books is how the author (petey d) combines patients stories, examples from literature and hard-core science in a very readable format. It reads like a good fictionary novel almost, especially the parts about what role depression has had in culture during the last five hundred years or so.