Nutritional immune modulation therapies for CFIDS—part III

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients,  Nov, 2003  by Michael Rosenbaum

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These are the major individual nutrients that affect the immune response:

Zinc, a potent T helper cell inducer, the only nutrient that can act as a T cell mitogen, that similar to PHA or Con A, it can increase the activation and proliferation of T cells. It may be the single best nutrient defense against viral infections. There is an epidemic of zinc deficiency in the United States, and it gets worse as people age. And even subtle deficiencies in zinc can cause immune problems.

Vitamin A, is the next one of real importance. It does two things. It raises nonspecific immunity because it improves the integrity of the skin and the mucus membranes. We talk about the "leaky gut"--Vitamin A is critical to helping improve the "leaky gut." It has the direct ability to raise secretory IgA and it raises the lysozymes in tears and in saliva. But it also functions in specific immunity. It stimulates the thymus. If the thymus is shriveled up, it reverses the atrophy and restores the thymus to normal size. And an important caveat--viral infections cause an acute and sudden, often profound drop in serum Vitamin A. And if you have a patient with even a common cold that is not responding to Vitamin C, look at the Vitamin A level because it can often plummet. And often when you replenish the Vitamin A the immune response is restored, and the defense against viruses is restored as well.

Antioxidants as a whole are very important, both water soluble and fat soluble. You'll notice I put one antioxidant in red as Dr. Teitelbaum emphasized. This may be the linchpin--glutathione may be the single most important antioxidant in terms of immune integrity. But the major effect of antioxidants is on macrophages and neutrophils. It has an indirect effect on T cells. It boosts the activity of macrophages and neutrophils. If the concentration of glutathione goes down in TH1 cells, a person becomes far more susceptible to serious infections, and this happens in HIV-1. This happens in TH1, it happens in AIDS. When people revert from HIV to AIDS their levels of glutathione plummet and if you restore that, you might be able to protect a person from developing AIDS. The major nutrients to boost glutathione are NAC (N-Acetyl-cysteine), whey and various whey products, especially the undenatured high biological activity whey, and alpha lipoic acid. And one way to lose glutathione is with excessive exercise.

Unsaturated fatty acids like fish oils and vegetable oils are immunosuppressive. This is very useful for autoimmune diseases, but not very useful if you're trying to protect yourself against a virus.

There are hormones that up-regulate the immune response: DHEA is a TH1 stimulant, testosterone and growth hormone. You down-regulate the immune response with cortisone and with estrogens.

So we've looked at individual nutrients. These are the whole food extracts, starting with thymus preparations. Thymus glandulars of various sorts are on the market. There are various thymus extracts, there are fetal cell injections.

One product that I love, and I have had the privilege of working with and doing some research on, is a product called Thymic Protein A. Thymic Protein A was discovered in the early 1980's by Dr. Terry Beardsley and it is a native thymic polypeptide that is necessary for the activation of TH1 cells. It's purified from the thymus of one calf that was taken twelve years ago, and it is grown in cell culture and we take it under the tongue; we take it sublingually.

I had the privilege of participating in a three month study utilizing Thymic Protein A, and we were able to publish the results in the Journal of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine in December 2001. And what we did is we gave 23 patients three packets or twelve micrograms of TPA a day to evaluate their effects on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and on quality of life. And we measured all the standard measurements for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: natural killer cell membrane activity, (2-5)A synthetase, RNAase L, and these activation markers that I described to you.

At the end of only three months our results I think were very, very impressive. The activation markers moved in the way they should have moved to restore immune integrity. The CD11b, which is low in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, went up. In two out of three people, the CD38 and DR+, which are high went down in between 60 and 75% of our patients. There was a slight improvement in natural killer cell number and activity, not significant because TPA has no direct effect on natural killer cells. The levels of RNAase L tended to go down in general, even though oftentimes they were still within the normal range, they were in the high normal range, and we noticed about a 25% drop in those markers. Significant declines in symptom scores--particularly non-restorative sleep--improving in about 70%. Improvements in short term memory, depression, panic attacks, all in the range of about 50-70% improvements. So those are the thymus extracts.