High glutathione in some PWCs

[Guest guest]

Hi, all.

As regular readers here know, I have been writing a lot about

glutathione depletion in CFS, which I think is a significant part of

the pathogenesis of CFS for many PWCs. In the light of this, there

are a couple of papers in the literature (which I cited in my poster

paper) that have been puzzling to me. They are the paper by

s et al. (2000), which is reference 9 in my poster paper, and

the paper by Fulle et al. (ref. 10 in my paper).

(My paper can be found at

http://www.cfsresearch.org/cfs/research/treatment/15.htm )

The paper by s et al. reported finding that CFS patients

could be divided statistically into two distinct groups, one having

significantly elevated erythrocyte (red blood cell) glutathione

relative to a healthy control group, and the other having

significantly lower values.

The paper by Fulle et al. reported finding elevated total

glutathione in muscle biopsy specimens from CFS patients relative to

healthy controls.

So what is going on with the patients who have elevated glutathione?

Tim recently asked me about this, so I have given it some

more thought. In the light of the recent results of el al. in

autism, showing single nucleotide polymorphisms in three enzymes in

autistic kids, including one of the glutathione S-transferases, I

think I now understand what's going on in these elevated glutathione

patients.

If these patients have a single nucleotide polymorphism in one or

more of the glutathione peroxidase enzymes or the glutathione S-

transferase enzymes that slows the corresponding reactions down

significantly, this would lower the demand for glutathione and might

allow its concentrtion to rise, but the person's body would still

not be able to make effective use of the glutathione, and the

symptoms that resulted would be similar to (but perhaps not as many

or as severe) as those that would result from across-the-board

depletion of glutathione, since the latter would affect all the uses

of glutathione, whereas the former would affect only those uses

mediated by the affected enzyme (or enzymes).

It would be very interesting to see what the single nucleotide

polymorphism picture is for these enzymes that utilize glutathione,

in this group of patients with elevated glutathione. I think that

the Great Smokies Lab Genovations tests characterize some of these

enzymes, but not all of them. Perhaps as time goes on and more

tests become available, we will have a clearer picture.

In the meantime, I continue to encourage people with CFS to obtain a

test for glutathione. One advantage of the blood tests for red

blood cell or plasma glutathione is that they measure glutathione

directly, so they are able to tell if glutathione is high or low,

relative to normal. I don't think that the lymphocyte glutathione

function test can tell whether glutathione is low, or whether the

enzymes using glutathione have low activity. So this might be an

advantage of the direct tests.

Rich Van Konynenburg, Ph.D.