The board is a major internet health board. If you search the acne boards according to number of views, my thread is still the second most viewed thread ever posted on the acne boards.
Over 75000 people viewed it, a sizable proportion of which contributed to its development.
I will here attempt to put down its main points which hopefully will evolve in time to a more complete theory.
First-me; i am a medical doctor, who had suffered from acne for 15 years. I have had 3 courses of antibiotics, 2 of which lasted over 3 years each. I had also had 3 courses of isotretinoin (accutane). I have used every topical lotion on the market. I have researched every aspect of this condition.
The theory began with a number of observations.
10 years ago i had a chat with a chinese medical doctor who also examined me.
He told me that the reason my spots persisted despite my healthy lifestyle etc was that i has inheritantly a 'fast burner'. Everything i ate was burnt quickly by my body and produces excess toxins, which causes acne. I read more about this way of looking at things and discovered that the indian medical tradition of ayuveda also had a similar concept to explain acne.
I wanted to put this into a western medical paradigm.
I happened apon a metabolism textbook, describing a metabolic polymorphism (normal genetic varient) that gave rise to a 'histadelic' metabolism.
people who are described as histadelics, have too much histamine.
Histamine causes a raised metabolism. Fast metabolisms over produce toxins. Could this be the answer?
A large proportion of people have 'hisadelic' metabolisms. The reason for this is unclear, but the high level of histamine causes certain characteristics. we tend to be thin, with long fingers, when we look at the sun we might sneeze. We can get very depressed at times and find it quite hard to put on weight.
Vitamin C is a natural anti-histamine which our ancestors lost the ability to produce sometime close to the last ice age. Some evolutionary biologists believe that it may have been an advantage in the ice age to have less vitamin C in our bodies, because vitamin C is a natural antihistamine, so less vitamin C means more histamine, more histamine means faster metabolism, and faster metabolism means more heat produced, more heat will obviously be an advantage in an ice age.
Histadelics
Symptoms - Allergic; Excess Mucous, other allergies, sneeze in sunlight
Symptoms - Environmental; Poor tolerance to heat, good tolerance to cold ( fast metabolism)
Symptoms - Gas-Internal (GI) - General- Frequent/unexplained nausea (? after sugar)
-Poor pain tolerance,frequent colds/virus, excess saliva
Symptoms- Psych- Obscessions, compulsions, phobias, depression, highly driven and motivated
-Highly driven personality, very creative, high sex drive, addictions
Symptoms-Physical- increased perspiration, warm skin, muscle and joint pains, slender fingers and toes, lean build
I match many of these symptoms.
First i would like to briefly summarize the theory, for two reasons, first to get this 'out there asap, and secondly for those who have already waided through all the research done on the health boards. I will over time go through bit by bit all the research which backs this theory up on this blog. This will take time in order to do it correctly. In the meantime for those who want to read through it all, i would suggest looking through the thread on the health board, do a search on their 'acne' board, for 'Acne:The New Theory'.
In Brief:
Some of us are histadelics, this causes excess histamine levels which causes our mitochondia (energy producing factories in every body cell) to work faster. In particular there is an energy producing process in the mitochondial factories called oxidative phosphorylation, which is sped up.
This process as a by-product of energy production produces free radicals, free radicals cause inflammation, inflammation is an important issue in the pathogenesis of acne.
Specifically the free radicals work on another factory' in our cells called 'peroxisomes'. The skin (or membrane) of these little 'fat depots' contain receptors called 'peroxisome proliferator activated receptors. The activation of these receptors (mainly two types called 'alpha and 'gamma') cause complicated changes in ketatin deposition rates in our sebaceous glands (which as we all know are dysregulated' in acne) and alterations in the fatty compostion of sebum, these two changes are important in the pathogenesis of acne.
Another huge discovery was that many differences in metabolism, such as 'histadelia' or 'insulin resistance'. Cause an imbalance in the part of the immune system that regualtes how the immune system reacts to triggers. This component is called the T-Helper cell. There are two of these cells, TH1 and TH2. There are histamine receptors on some immune cells called H2 receptors (the same receptos that cause acid production in the stomach, but different to the receptors which are blocked by 'antihistamines' for allergies-wgich are H1 receptors).
By activating these H2 receptors, histamine results in an imbalance in the relative activities of TH1 and TH2 cells, leading to a type of immune responce known as 'delayed type hypersensitivity'. This is the type of immune response that i believe underlies acne.
This is the bare bones of the theory, rushed through. I will be posting the research soon, and the details of highly successful treatment regimes based on the ideas in the theory. Basically the paradigm shift is that acne is not hormonal, although hormones play a role, but many people with high levels of testosterone and DHT (the active form of testosterone) dont have acne.
Many people with insulin resistance dont have acne. I believe that all these factors contribute to a final common pathway, the- histadelia, insulin resiatance,TH1:Th2, PPAR pathway- resulting in a tipping point and delayed type hypersensitivity. This is delayed immune over-reaction to certain allergens and bacteria in dys-regualted sebum glands, results in the type of localised inflammtion we recognise all to well as a spot.
It may interest you to know that other than insulin resiatnce and histadelia, candiasis toxin, zinc deficiency, EPA deficiency and excess saturated fatty acids also perpetuate the TH2:TH1 imbalance. Could this be the final common explanation that ties in all these known triggers for acne?
