Proving the impact of mold and its mycotoxins on human health to conventional medicine requires a lot of patience as well as lots of patient data which is why I am reviewing a series of articles that investigated how mold changes human health. From caring for over 1000 mold-affected patients and seeing them recover after mold removal and detox, I am pretty confident that mold makes people sick, but I don’t have the time or ability to put this into an airtight paper right now. Therefore, I look to the work of others in research labs around the world to demonstrate with a variety of studies that many mechanisms exist for mold’s impact on human health.
In this research, Lichtenstein and others from Harvard and other Academic centers report that both satratoxin G from Stachybotrys chartarum and spores from three other common molds produced objective changes in cytokine levels released from peripheral blood monocytes (PBMC).
Before getting into the details, a little background understanding may be helpful. For those not familiar with biology terms or mold toxicity, here are some starting points. Molds are fungi that make various chemicals, some of which are toxins to other organisms like bacteria or other fungi around them. Stachybotrys is commonly known as “black mold” and one of the more impactful on human health. It makes satratoxins and other toxins. PBMC’s are immune cells that help prevent and fight infections in our bodies. Cytokines are the chemical messengers released by PMBC’s and other immune cells to coordinate their work against infections of all sorts.
With this brief introduction, you may already see the importance of changing cytokine levels, as these messengers will turn up or turn down or alter in some way how our immune system responds to infections. An experiment which demonstrates that mycotoxins or mold spores affect cytokine levels, suppressing or overstimulating the immune system, therefore, provides a mechanism to explain how these foreign materials could impact human health. We also have that without exposing a person to mold and without having to sort through an excess of potential confusions. Also important is the fact that some of these cytokines act only nearby, their changing level never appearing in the blood for us to measure.
Now, we do have to take a small study like this with a grain of salt. They compared 33 people who had been exposed (confirmed by testing the workplace) in a moldy work environment with 17 controls who did not have a known mold exposure. This research should be replicated with larger numbers, different mold toxins, and possibly other cytokines (I would add Transforming Growth Factor Beta 1), but it serves as a great starting point.
Among the dozens of cytokines operating in our bodies moment-by-moment, they looked at 10 potential cytokines. They took the PBMC’s from both groups and then exposed the cells outside the person to different mold toxins and mold spores themselves. They then measured the response of these cells to monitor these ten cytokines.
With this procedure (overly simplified for this explanation) they found differences between the cells from the people exposed to mold versus those not previously exposed. First, six cytokines were higher with satratoxin G exposure of the PBMC. Second, different cytokines were found to be lower after exposure to various spores. For penicillium chyrsogenum, 4 cytokines decreased. For Cladosporum herbarum, four cytokines were decreased with exposure. For Aspergillus niger, no changes were noted in the tested cytokines.
Interpreting this data using some machine learning algorithms, they stated that the results from these cytokines could differentiate mold-exposed test subjects from the control group. This does not mean that such a cytokine panel is ready for prime time testing, but it does mean other researchers should take this seriously and that the clinicians seeing patients should rethink their adamant stance against mold toxicity.
Helping our patients live healthier, more abundant lives requires my reading these studies (though I enjoy doing so) and sharing the findings with you and with our patients so they understand that they have a real medical condition behind their symptoms. From there we can begin to walk them towards health restoration.
Get started with Sanctuary today!
Click below to schedule your first conversation with our Patient Support Team.
Original Article:
Environmental Mold and Mycotoxin Exposures Elicit Specific Cytokine and Chemokine Responses. Rosenblum Lichtenstein JH, Hsu YH, Gavin IM, Donaghey TC, Molina RM, et al. (2015) Environmental Mold and Mycotoxin Exposures Elicit Specific Cytokine and Chemokine Responses. PLOS ONE 10(5): e0126926. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0126926
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
Colson Potter writes copious fiction and nonfiction, including a weekly Proverbs post and his blog at Creational Story.
