There is a lot of data that we could study from everyone given the unique expressions of our immune systems. And with many variables that exist, we measure a miniscule few and therefore cannot often get a good picture of chronic health issues. As to your comment downvote, it may rise again. Sometimes trolls and/or people who don't like new ideas will readily dismiss things (here and elsewhere).
My young son, now 7 (no stutter), did stutter at age 4 and had some level of anxiety. My wife and I discovered that he has an allergy to annatto, a natural seed used for orange dye & nutty flavor, that triggered the stuttering. The stuttering was likely due to slight inflammation in his brain. In this case, slice of organic American (orange) cheese caused him to stutter within 10 minutes. Then we could tell when he had goldfish crackers for snack at school (dad, they weren't purple crackers, they were orange -- said with a strong stutter). His stuttering disappeared within a couple months of removing annatto foods from his diet. What about the annatto ~triggered inflammation, we do not know (I have an idea, but it's pretty hard to test).
Oh wow, incredible comment. I looked this up and apparently allergies are pretty strongly linked to stuttering. It's a connection I'd never assume to be possible.
As someone who sometimes has weeks of cluttered speech, and weeks where I'm perfectly fine, I'm now wondering if diet could be a contributing factor.
Food allergy is one of the reasons I theorize many people find different seemingly unrelated symptoms disappear when either fasting or on a low carbohydrate diet (even things like seizures).
It alters your diet so dramatically and greatly reduces the types of processed foods you can eat.
We noticed he was more tentative and starting to stutter around the winter holidays, but could not figure out what the pattern was. Then one early evening before dinner we gave him a slice of organic, orange American cheese (milk, salt, enzymes, annatto). He started stuttering shortly thereafter. He'd had ice cream the previous day with no issues. Then we noticed it after mac'n cheese. Upon reflection, his grandparents brought cheddar duckies to snack on during the holidays. At that point we started eliminating it and did not notice a stutter. Sometimes after pre-school, when he was stuttering, I asked him how his <non-orange> crackers were and he would always say "orange" crackers. We avoided anything obviously "orange" and the problem went away in a number of weeks. It popped up again while eating chicken tenders (cheap ski lodge food) and then we started noticing that the breading in many packaged chicken tenders had annatto for color. The same with cheap vanilla ice cream. He's all good now though -- we were lucky.
Amazing! Congratulations on spotting it. How old is he now? Does the annatto affect him still?
Do you know if this is known in the scientific community? I am not a speech language researcher but I’ve never heard of allergy induced stuttering but the inflammation hypothesis really strikes a chord.
He is 8 now and minor amounts of annatto, by accident, do not seem to trigger it. We taught him what to look for and avoid anything orangish in color without asking us. I do have a friend whose nephew throws up when he has annatto, but I haven't come across the stuttering connection. I should amend my comment above, we ruled out dairy as a cause given the milk, yogurt, kefir as well.
We try to exclude it from his diet and minimize it in the house, although he's shown no serious anaphylaxis from it. Typo above, he is 7, not 8. At some point trials for food additives would be helpful...for everyone. I certainly cannot speak to all of the stuttering scenarios, but avoiding a few is better than nothing.
Take a bunch of people and remove annatto from the diet of half of them. For the annatto foods or their placebo substitutes, grind up and dye the food so the eater can't distinguish from placebo.
Fascinating. I also had an allergy to “orange” colored foods as a kid, but it looked like asthma, not a stutter. However, the very worst was orange soda, which was hospitalizing. I wonder if there was any relation to your son’s stutter.
Neuroquant imaging filters for MRI are supposed to detect changes like this, but are quite expensive and not readily available. The pediatricians shrugged their shoulders. Functional medicine doctors would be more willing to pursue this approach (they like data). The trick is finding the root cause of the swelling, which is usually an immune response to a protein it does not like and wants to isolate. I am unaware of other locations in my son's body that become inflamed by Annatto, his stutter was/is the first notable symptom.
Is it the Annatto itself that collected in my son's brain/frontal lobe and triggered inflammation? A brain scan at that time would probably help shed light.
Was something else there that Annatto reacted with/killed and my son's system inflamed due to the residual proteins (it's used as an anti-parasitic in native cultures - and yes, herbs can cause a die off as most lyme+ patients have demonstrated repeatedly - and I will get forehead pressure from a die-off, my son might be similar in that regard)?
In short, there's not enough data or an easy way to gather it.
"Inflammation has long been a well-known symptom of many infectious diseases, but molecular and epidemiological research increasingly suggests that it is also intimately linked with a broad range of non-infectious diseases, perhaps even all of them"
It's relevant. Mycotoxins (mold produced), and metals can also cause inflammation. In general, it's the immune system trying to sequester or isolate foreign material.
LSD and Mushrooms. They work wonders, I'd start with microdoses, though a good plateau trip works for years after.
Microdoses and an introduction to the culture of these chems, there's ever more material of these online, then, 15 years ago when I first experimented and that's both exciting and sad because if you were to rely solely on social media/reddit/twitter ancedotes you really won't get the full package.
I'd look at forums, erowid and published research journals for the full picture. :)
Thanks for posting. It lends credence to collecting more data from everyone to better determine T-cell reactivity to a number of pathogens (virus, bacteria, etc) and then let the patients own their data with the freedom/incentive to share that data for research and education. I prefer trying to gather data to identify levels of pre-existing immunities and who is higher risk. The higher risk people could opt for an immune hammer (vaccine).
Agree with your position on this, your take sounds very sensible. I wondered at the start of this if some of the larger DNA databases would be mapped and analysed to look for markers for this exact sort of thing. ( 23andme, DOD, ancestry )
It's good that the athletic departments are getting tests like this done for their athletes to provide more information about systemic damage for symptomatic & asymptomatic infections. Most insurance plans and doctors would not pay/call for MRI imaging for hearts. More systemic testing/data is needed.
It's quite possible that if most people owned a solar roof with batteries and redundancy across a specified and localized grid, there would be less need for large power plant owners and fewer donations to political parties. In short, it is easier for politicians to get donations from a small group of people than from a large group.
I think there are plants like Cryptoleptis and Sida Acuta that can be used as tonics or to treat Malaria. They are effective against it's lesser known and less virulent cousin Babesia (common in the US via biting insects or blood donations). Test reliability could be improved significantly, including T-cell responses (sound familiar?;-). I think due to the unsustainable cost model of western patented pharmaceuticals and their lack of adaptability and/or side effects, many are also looking into herbal approaches and studies on efficacy & safety.
Sorry, but I don't think this is good advice. Malaria medication does generally work well, I only pointed out that unlike something like Aids and antiretrovirals, it's just not something you can use safely and at scale, for the rest of your life.
If those plants are effective against malaria, it is inevitable that it should be applied in a practical way, which often turns out to be in the form of pills.
I agree. There are so many variables whose interaction is influenced by each individual's unique immune expression, that we need to measure more of those variables for everyone to start identifying common patterns. I would hope that each vaccine volunteer has a minimum amount of testing (>= https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/07/15/scie...) before and after each vaccine dose. It would also be very beneficial to measure their HLA genetic SNPs (see GSK's MERS vaccine induced narcolepsy in 2009). Transparency and increased measurement of immune data will help improve and/or customize vaccines so that they are effective and safe.
Perhaps enjoy some turmeric to lower IL-6, which is widely used to positive effect in many non-pharma regimens and is also complimentary with some pharma.
Our immune systems are very complex and unique! If you want to apply scientific method and improve outcomes (safety, efficacy), then there is a lot more data to collect. Sharing that data and allowing recipients to own their data, would go a long way towards improving vaccine safety and allow for customization as needed. My children have had ~minor/moderate reactions to the varicella vaccine (fluid on my son's hip joint ~2" from injection site at 23 days--ER doctors just shrug), my daughter a moderate rash. How could these be improved? Guillain-Barre is very real side effect as well. How can it be avoided? I accumulate metals easily, so Al, a potent neurotoxin hangs out in my system much longer than others (possible/probable HLA variant). Shouldn't the adjuvant for my vaccines exclude Al?
Measuring temperature & physical symptoms is a good start. It would be great if these trials would measure each recipients HLA SNPs (see GSK MERS 2009 fiasco and others), T-cells (CD4/8/57/etc), inflammation markers like C3a,C4a,TGF-b, MMP-9, and cytokines like TNF-a -- before and after each vaccine dose. Measuring for all ingredients pre-post each dose is also important because the metabolization for each component is not uniform. Stop using 2010+ technology to make vaccines & medications and then evaluating the applied result with 1990s (or earlier) methods.
So if you want to shut up 'anti-vaxxers' than collect/share the data from everyone who receives a vaccine and improve the process instead of shrouding results or conducting half-assed studies (AstraZeneca using meningitis vaccine as control instead of true placebo).
Spending a bunch more time collecting data to convince people who reflexively put their fingers in their ears when presented with evidence seems a decidedly wrong-headed approach.
I agree it doesn't make sense for the purpose of convincing anti-vaxxers. But I do think sometimes valuable research topics end up getting thrown out "with the bathwater" so to speak when the general public gets too wrapped up in a pseudoscientific interpretation (especially when that interpretation was originally supported by some poorly done or fraudulent published research).
For example, galvanic skin response was used for very bullshit purposes, which led to research on it essentially stopping for over a decade. But recently it has been rebranded as "electrodermal activity", and turns out to have use for studying Epilepsy as well as other promising potential use cases (such as improving sleep staging without EEG).
I am less aware of literature on side effects for current vaccines, so I don't know if this same phenomenon has happened. But I wouldn't be surprised if certain lines of thinking are reflexively stomped down right now.
Maybe this just needs to be the natural life cycle of science though, it might be for the greater good to let anti-vax die down before doing anything which could stoke their flames.
Spending time collecting data is for improving our understanding of an individual's immune system. Sharing that data helps educate those who are unfamiliar with, but have complete ownership of their body.
Data needs a narrative attached, otherwise it's just noise. There is a point where adding more data doesn't change the narrative, so it's pointless to continue gathering data.
Are the immune responses to the vaccine identical across the trial group? No. Is everyone's response to sars-cov-2 identical? No. Is everyone's immune system unique in its signaling and adaptive behavior? Yes. How is it possible to correlate immune responses by measuring 0.000x percent of the available data? We do not have complete understanding of our immune systems, thus we need more data and most of it can be relevant.
Ok, you can sit in a corner for the next 1000 years while all of that data is gathered for you. A glimpse at your username suggests you have intense bias with regards to the human body and its immune system.
I watched an interview with an individual who after receiving a tetanus shot developed transverse myelitis. His immune system started destroying his spinal cord. He was young, healthy, athletic, and had previously received tetanus shots without issue. He is now wheel chair bound, can barely move and is in intense pain 24/7. The injection caused every muscle in his body to spasm causing unbearable pain.
One big question about this for me is wondering if any group is looking for why this happened. I feel that either the pharmaceutical company or the government should be spending significant research dollars understanding what happened in this case.
It also shows that vaccines are not 100% safe, which seems to be the general narrative.
When the truth maybe something more like you have a 1 in 10 million chance of living the rest of your life in agony, but you are required to accept the risk for the good of everyone.
So maybe collecting the blood markers suggested by the parent poster would be a step in understanding why things go so badly for some people.
> (AstraZeneca using meningitis vaccine as control instead of true placebo).
AFAICR, this was done on purpose to prevent people from figuring out they got a vaccine shot, because an inert placebo wouldn't cause any side effects.
A shot with saline would help demonstrate some of the side effects (localized aches or damage to the muscle), but would not elicit the same response as different vaccine with roughly known side effects (feedback on vaccine administration reactions is far from ideal). The other possibility is minimizing the appearance of side effects by comparing against the control group.
T cell responses are interesting. Infectolab (https://www.infectolab-americas.com/) and its originator Armin (Germany) are using T cell responses for tick borne diseases like: Borellia (Lyme), Bartonella and Babesia because antibody testing is difficult for these (broken via CDC specs as most labs won't test key proteins 31, 34 and never indicate which antibodies are present). Bartonella is very hard to test for with antibody and PCR. It really depends on lab specialty. The sars-cov-2 antibody tests are unpredictable in quality, so nearly useless (my dr is 0-50 via Quest and many people had + PCR).
In short, our immune context (genetic phenotype) is unique! We need a lot more data from everyone to start making accurate correlations. We do not measure T-cells, cytokines, mast cells, b-cells, HLA (partly how we potentially make antibodies) at any meaningful level to provide much confidence. Many natural/industrial substances suppress our T-cell responses and generally innate immune system (metals, mold toxins, etc), so we also need to start accounting for those.
It's a long road we have in front of us. Hopefully the medical system supports patient data ownership and research to improve on our obvious ignorance.
Note that Armin Labs are considered quacks by many. For one example [1]. I will leave it to others to do your own research but just wanted to recommend caution about their use. Especially for diagnosis of Lyme, plenty of tragic stories of people getting an Armin positive test while negative on the others and then being encouraged through years of serious antibiotic treatments only to have always been negative all along.
I mentioned Armin/Invecto since they are looking at T-cell responses to pathogens. Much of the prolonged antibiotic treatment is no longer common practice. It damages the GI, suppresses portions of the immune system and is in many cases bypassed by 2 resistant forms of Lyme (round body starvation form & biofilm colonies). Most of my testing has been through Igenex, which has a lot of experience with antibody testing that places like Quest screw up. The typical Western Blot for Borellia (Lyme) is not a frequent test for many of the labs and requires 5 - 7 IgM or IgG that won't form in the patient because their immune system is too suppressed to manifest all of them. For example, the outer protein of Lyme does not have to shift and result in another antibody presentation because the host immune system has not forced it to. The CDC spec deliberately ignores two specific antibody proteins OSP 31, 34 as do the common tests and instructs most labs not to reveal which antibodies the patient has. Therefore, that patient might have some, but not all of the "required" antibodies.
As I mentioned above, metals & mold toxins can generate a lot of inflammation in some people that manifest as "foggy brain", joint aches, etc. It takes time and diagnostic testing paired with treatment protocols. Some people cannot process Aluminum and Mercury forms out of their body without relying on Glutathione (limited detox pathways, start with HLA genetic SNPs).
It's a good thing most western medicine doctors never prescribe expensive pharmaceuticals long term ... oh wait ;-)
Curious about your thoughts on a patient that tested both the Quest and IgeneX immunoblots at the same time. The Quest showing 5 positive bands. And the IgeneX no positive bands. Then repeated the same two tests four months later at the same time with the same results. So Quest repeatedly CDC positive, IgeneX repeatedly negative. How would you interpret that?
I would ask which Quest lab specifically ran the test as lab quality can vary. I have not seen mainstream labs return all of the antibody stains present in some time, they usually indicate (+/-) for IgM (less likely) or IgG (more likely). The count is also usually indicated (titer level). It also depends which antibody proteins are present. Many of them overlap with other pathogens (IE: 41 covers most of the spirochete class: Borellia, Leptospirosis, Syphilis, etc). It depends on current & historical symptoms and markers like C3a/TGF-b/MMP-9/CD57,8 and would probably try other tests for markers, possibly another Lyme specific test at a different, but specialized lab like Galaxy Diagnostics (well known for Bart), Fry labs or another in NY whose name escapes me.
