[RGBREC]

Hi! I've been having some severe issues with leaky gut. Anyone have any help for me? I have been having some neuropathological issues like muscle twitching whenever I eat certain foods. My food sensitivities are getting worse, so I'm gonna try rotating my foods to never eating the same food within 3 days.

Thanks,
Rob

[Lara]

Welcome to the NeuroTalk Support Groups!

I see you've post already in a couple of the forums. I just wanted to also suggest the

Gluten Sensitivity / Celiac Disease Forum

just in case that is a possibility for your symptoms.

There is also a Forum Search Feature here. Specific condition forums or a whole Forum search can be done. Just need to type in the relevant keywords. e.g. there are many older posts in Gluten/Celiac Forum for "leaky gut".

http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/search.php

All the best to you figuring out what's going on.

[RGBREC]

Thanks Lara,

Thanks so much for your reply! I've been gluten-free for several years now. Unfortunately my problem goes much further and deeper than that. I have progressive food sensitivities I'm dealing with.

Luckily, today I remembered that it might be due to my not taking my probiotics. Once I stopped taking it and started getting rashes on my abdomen, and when I resumed taking them, they went away. I might just be responding even worse this time after going off of them. I went back on them hard today and I think I'm feeling better already. I'll keep updating.

The probiotic I've been using is the SCD/GaPS Compliant one from Seeking Health. It has tons of histamine-degrading bacteria, if you're familiar with those and what they do.

Thanks again,
Rob

[Dr. Smith]

Hi Rob,

There's a short Leaky Gut Syndrome thread in the Allergies & Multiple Chemical Sensitivity forum.

Doc

[RGBREC]

Doc,

Thanks for the link! I actually did read that one today, and I saw that you were kind of skeptical of whether it exists. Leaky gut is very very very real! There are plenty of studies that corroborate it. It is actually the future of health.

Hippocrates said (and I hope I'm quoting correctly), "All health begins in the gut."

In my opinion, from all I've read, leaky gut is truly the cause of most if not all unexplainable autoimmune and neuropathological issues. If you'd like, I can dig up some links to PubMed articles, but at the moment, I'd rather just put it out there that it's for real, and you might benefit from reading up more on it.

Thanks,
Rob

[Dr. Smith]

Originally Posted by RGBREC

Doc,

Thanks for the link! I actually did read that one today, and I saw that you were kind of skeptical of whether it exists. Leaky gut is very very very real! There are plenty of studies that corroborate it.

Perhaps you misread/misconstrued me. "Leaky gut" is not the same as "Leaky Gut Syndrome".

Note: Some medical scientists use the term "leaky gut" for problems associated with abnormal intestinal permeabilty, but "leaky gut syndrome" is not one of them.
http://www.quackwatch.org/01Quackery...opics/fad.html

I would be very interested in taking a look at any credible studies relating to "Leaky Gut Syndrome". I just checked PubMed and Goggle Scholar again, and still find nothing related to that term.

The reason I urge caution is the abundance of charlatans/quacks who use that term to sell sick suffering people worthless nostrums/remedies/treatments. I've been down that road, and was taken in myself out of naïvety and desperation (the bargaining stage of Kübler-Ross).

This theory is vague and largely unproven, and there is no evidence that the remedies marketed for treating leaky gut bring the benefits they claim.
....
There is some concern that the promotion of the contentious "leaky gut syndrome" diagnosis is a dishonest ploy designed to make money from the sale of supposed remedies for it.
....
Leaky gut syndrome is not a recognized medical diagnosis, but a proposed condition that is claimed to be the root cause of many ailments, including chronic fatigue syndrome and multiple sclerosis.[2] According to the UK National Health Service,

There is little evidence to support this theory, and no evidence that so-called 'treatments' for 'leaky gut syndrome', such as nutritional supplements and a gluten-free diet, have any beneficial effect for most of the conditions they are claimed to help.

....
Some skeptics and scientists say that the marketing of treatments for leaky gut syndrome is either misguided or an instance of deliberate health fraud.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_gut_syndrome

Doc

[RGBREC]

(can't post the link, but the article is called "Intestinal permeability defects: is it time to treat?" on PubMed)

This article basically points out that there are no studies proving causation, but it doesn't deny that intestinal permeability is real. In fact, it discusses that it is. It points out that there has been correlation found in many diseases between increased intestinal permeability and symptoms/the disease.

So, for our purposes, and the purposes of "charlatans/quacks," we are using the term Leaky Gut Syndrome to describe a propensity towards increased and inappropriate intestinal permeability. To my knowledge, the permeability of the gut is generally controlled by the beneficial (and otherwise) bacteria in the gut. Therefore, with an imbalance, the tight junctions become less tight and allow pathogens/proteins/nutrients to cross the epithelial barrier. It's actually quite simple and a model from which they've been working for a long time.

It sounds like you're just quibbling with the label of Leaky Gut Syndrome. Would there have to be a PubMed article or a guy within the academic "scholarly article" circles who pronounced the name Leaky Gut Syndrome to be a valid thing before you allow us to use that term, or do you want us to refer to the "approved" term of intestinal permeability? The way I see it, if you have a leaky gut, you have a leaky gut. I guess it shouldn't matter if someone dubs it a syndrome. I don't even think I've ever said it allowed when talking about my own ailment. I just say, "I think it's leaky gut."

In like 2000, there was an episode of Malcolm in the Middle where they talked about leaky gut (in jest). Pretty crazy? But it seems that alternative medicine has been approaching treatment in this way for a very long time, and it is a good model to approach the treatment of these ailments.

Do you deny that this approach of treating a propensity toward intestinal permeability has healed countless individuals of all kinds of neurological ailments and

If you don't deny this, then why quibble with people about a term that is the basis and starting point for this treatment. These people who treat leaky gut are certainly making more headway than those who treat the symptoms with Ritalin, proton pump inhibitors, arthritis medication, statins, lithium, anti-psychotics, Actos, and all sorts of nasty side-effect–causing drugs. Perhaps I've just gone off the deep end on my belief in alternative medicine and naturopaths as the correct choice over MDs. I dunno. Me and about 200 million other looneys from around the world on the Internet.

I must say, though, my (former) MD, when I got sick, did tell me to take a probiotic. Props to that. So at least they're even starting to treat the source of the problem, based on a trickle-down effect of scholarly articles that show a correlation I guess.






Doc[/QUOTE]

[Dr. Smith]

I'm sorry; you seem to be looking for an argument/debate where none exists.

the correlation between increased intestinal permeability and disease has caught the attention of the public, leading to a rise in popularity of the diagnosis of "leaky gut syndrome," which encompasses a range of systemic disorders. Proponents claim that barrier restoration will cure underlying disease, but this has not been demonstrated in clinical trials. Moreover, human and mouse studies show that intestinal barrier loss alone is insufficient to initiate disease.
Ibid.

Best wishes,

Doc

[RGBREC]

I seem to have missed that part of the abstract, sorry, but that doesn't change my stance.

There most certainly is a debate, and I heartily recommend you look into this some more, Doc. I can personally 100% guarantee that this subject will be the #1 most important subject researched and applied in the medical field (yes, even conventional medicine) in our generation/lifetime. I'm not sure if you're just disengaging because the confrontation is making you uncomfortable. In any case, I'm trying to provide the latest and most relevant information on the subject to counter your one-off quote from a Quackwatch article running the gamut of trying to shut down pretty much every alternative treatment whoever wrote it could hit with a stick. Gosh, they might as well say yoga and acupuncture have no use.

All health begins in the gut.

I recommend reading this scholarly article from 2003 on the Wiley Online Library: called "Intestinal barrier: An interface between health and disease"

I was referred there by a Daily Beast article called "New Research Shows Poorly Understood 'Leaky Gut Syndrome' Is Real, May Be Cause of Several Diseases." Interesting... I haven't gotten to the part about the new research. I guess we'll have to both see what this research says about it being the cause of several diseases.

Articles like this pop up all the time. People are treated in the ways that are speculated to help with leaky gut all the time and are healed, including the person referred to anecdotally in this article. There are definitely some serious studies that have been done and are being done on the matter. If I'm not mistaken, the article from my last post did imply that there was correlation between diseases and increased intestinal permeability. Perhaps the statement you quoted was very succinctly and somewhat misleadingly stating that there was simply no "causation" ever found. They said impaired epithelial barrier alone was never found to cause disease. Well, sure, a mouse could live in a sterile environment and then have its gut punctured or made permeable (however the heck they did that), but of course if it's not fed or introduced pathogens or even normal gut bacteria, it won't manifest any disease. Just speculating here.

Just an aside: The main point of my last reply to you was to say I do think it is quibbling to complain about the term "leaky gut syndrome" versus "leaky gut." Adding the word "syndrome" to a known and accepted condition is not that misleading. The need to make a distinction and to say "leaky gut" exists while "leaky gut syndrome" has never been proven is a disambiguation that just might confuse people rather than help them.

Thanks for humoring me, though, if you think I'm just debating for the sake of it. I'm truly concerned about getting these points across and helping people. I definitely want to protect this burgeoning and most likely helpful diagnosis which has helped so many people in very debilitating illnesses. I've heard story after story of recovery. It's all pretty incredible and miraculous really.