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Manganese is Lyme disease's double-edge sword
- ggm 1y agoAnd it's also a potent neurotoxin from a crude dr google lookup. Which is meaningless because they wouldnt bother exploring both sides of the deal if there wasn't a safe dose for humans which is bad for the bacteria, but it bears thinking about.
- canadiantim 1y agoSounds like starving Lyme of manganese is likely the better option that trying to overdose manganese. I don't know how effective a low-manganese diet or lifestyle would be though but it is very interesting.
- bitexploder 1y agoTake antibiotics. They generally just work.
- DANmode 1y agoAssuming you've tested for, identified, targeted, and then retested for, all of your coinfections. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem ubiquitous.
- kukkeliskuu 1y agoThe problem with antibiotics at least in some countries is that official guidelines take the position that chronic Lyme does not exist, and thus doctors are forbidden to write long-term prescription to antibiotics for Lyme. Short-term may not work, as research suggests that antibiotics works only on some phases of the life-cycle of borreliosis and only for some co-infections.
- bitexploder 1y agoChronic Lyme where the bacteria persists does not exist. There is no evidence the primary bacterial infection persists as far as I have been able to discover. So, that is a faulty starting point in terms of your framing. Now, what is chronic lyme, does the bacteria injure the nervous system, does it leave "debris" behind that maybe antibiotics somehow help the immune system attack and clear? That is way less clear and not validated medical science.
- donsupreme 1y agoIt appears that the body cannot produce manganese on its own it is an essential trace mineral that must be obtained from the diet. I wonder if a prolonged water fast would do the job.
- kragen 1y ago[flagged]
- bregma 1y agoIf you believe really hard and really try you can transmutate lead into manganese. Of course, eating all that lead will probably kill you first. At least your Lyme won't be a problem any more.
- safeimp 1y agoTrying to starve yourself of manganese would cause harm long before it affected Borrelia.
- kragen 1y agoWP says that manganese deficiency causes skeletal deformity and inhibition of wound healing. So I'm guessing that you could survive weeks in a severe-manganese-deficiency situation before you noticed any ill effects.
- Aurornis 1y ago> So I'm guessing that you could survive weeks in a severe-manganese-deficiency situation before you noticed any ill effects. Your guess would be wrong. Your body needs manganese for similar reasons that Lyme disease needs it. You also produce MnSOD. If you starved your body of manganese sufficiently (which I doubt you could do without eating a completely synthetic diet for months) then you'd be killing yourself in parallel with the Lyme disease.
- kragen 1y agoYou could probably add enough phosphate to all your food to prevent you from absorbing any manganese, then inject iron, calcium, and magnesium? Just guessing here. How long would it take you to die on a zero-manganese diet? If it's longer than it takes Borrelia, you still win!
- btilly 1y agoAs noted in my sibling comment, the standard of care for eliminating manganese is para-Aminosalicylic acid (PAS). Plenty of other treatments can remove manganese. But they all are biologically active in other unwanted ways.
- butvacuum 1y agoYou would die. Immediately, and screaming in agony.
- Aurornis 1y ago> I don't know how effective a low-manganese diet or lifestyle would be though but it is very interesting. You cannot achieve what the paper is discussing through diet or supplements. The paper is hypothesizing that if a drug could target the components of B. burgdorferi that regulate manganese then that would kill it. You cannot deprive the cells of manganese or overwhelm them through supplementation or restrictive diet. You would damage your own body long before reaching levels that killed the Lyme infection. I really hope the alternative medicine people don't start abusing this headline to push diets and supplements.
- canadiantim 1y agoI really hope the anti-medicine people don't start grasping for a middleman to get in between people and self care.
- Aurornis 1y ago> self care. Deliberately inducing manganese deficiency (which I doubt you could pull off while still eating food) isn't "self care". It's a misunderstanding of what this article is saying. Your body needs manganese and MnSOD (one of the target enzymes mentioned in the article) just as much as Lyme disease does. You could theoretically kill the Lyme by killing the host body, like that classic XKCD about destroying anything in a petri dish if you don't care about collateral damage. The key to making a successful treatment is finding a way to kill the infection without killing the host. Calling anything you're suggesting "self care" is dangerous and wrong.
- Aurornis 1y agoNobody, in the article or otherwise, is suggesting that you can take manganese to fight Lyme. I don’t know where you got that, but I hope nobody thinks to try it. The idea would be to look at all of the components that regulate manganese in B. burgdorferi and then look for drugs that might disrupt how they operate. Any solution would act indirectly by disrupting manganese balance in a targeted manner directed at B. burgdorferi, not by flooding the whole body with manganese. The cells regulate their internal manganese anyway, so supplementing manganese wouldn’t force it to go into those cells anyway. This is a PR release for some research that tries to stretch it into a promising treatment, but it's really more of an interesting discovery than a path to a new treatment.
- Pet_Ant 1y ago> or otherwise That's where you would be wrong. By the time you posted your comment there are already people hawking manganese bracelets on FaceBook as a cure for Lyme disease.
- Aurornis 1y agoI'm seeing comments jumping to conclusions about taking manganese supplements or trying to starve yourself of manganese. These are dangerously wrong interpretations of the article. Any interventions would have to be targeted directly at the B. burgdorferi to disrupt their internal regulation of manganese. It's a long shot used to make this research discovery sound more impressive, not an actual cure. Your own body uses manganese for critical processes like your metabolism, critical brain functionality, and generating important antioxidants in your mitochondria (MnSOD, the same one mentioned inside of Lyme in the article). Your body also regulates manganese absorption and excretion. Manganese deficiency is extremely rare outside of genetic conditions or other medical problems which interfere with this regulation. You can't really starve yourself of manganese by adjusting your diet or even by periods of fasting. So if you're reading this and thinking you could defeat Lyme by starving yourself of manganese or overdosing on manganese, don't. That's not what this article is saying.
- mlinhares 1y agoSome of the comments here are the kind of stuff that makes you lose faith in humanity.
- caycep 1y agothis sort of case presentation re manganese brain toxicity pops up from time to time too: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4515672/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4515672/
- btilly 1y agoI agree that we should not simply self-treat by supplements or starving ourselves. But you are dead wrong that interventions would need to be directly targeted at B. burgdorferi. The standard and effective treatment for TB back in the 1950s was a combination therapy with Streptomycin, Isoniazid (INH), and PAS. The purpose of PAS was to create a low manganese environment in the body, which put stress on Mycobacterium tuberculosis - the bacteria that causes TB. This stress did not kill the bacteria by itself, but it did make it more vulnerable to the rest of the treatment. Because of this treatment, we have a lot of data showing how well people do with low manganese for a period of 1-2 years. (That was the time that this treatment required.) It wasn't pleasant (in particular it came with nausea), but it was definitely survivable. If low manganese really does stress B. burgdorferi, then a similar combination is worth trying today. Better yet, this combination would not require the development of a new drug that needs FDA approval. It can be tried using only drugs that have been long approved, and which are already part of standard medical practice. (Granted, PAS is no longer used for TB. But it is the standard treatment for an excess of manganese.)
- meindnoch 1y agoLyme disease is basically a political weapon in today's America.
- bazmattaz 1y agoHuh? Explain
- anon_cow1111 1y agoLyme desperately needs more attention and revised CDC guideline as it's becoming an epidemic in the northeast United States. As and outdoor-hobbies type person I've had it 3 out of 4 previous years and have begun sourcing antibiotics from agricultural suppliers, or directly from India. Contrast this to my childhood in the same region, when tick-borne diseases were never even a blip on the radar. Supposedly this is because of climate change and much warmer winters allow deer ticks to spread rapidly. From my own anecdotes and research, none of the traditional guidance is accurate: -Never had a bullseye rash -Never had a tick attached more than 24 hours -When a tick was attached around 24 hours, infection rate was close to 50% and symptoms appeared within 10 days. Contrast to ~3% infection rate per cdc average. ...I suppose the sad irony here is that lyme is not getting attention because well... current generations never touch grass and the outbreak never appears as bad as it actually is.
- methyl 1y agowhat were your symptoms?
- anon_cow1111 1y agoFirst year: Very covid-like symptoms, to the point where I initially did a quick home covid test (or multiple tests if I remember) that was negative. Very distinct soreness around the crease of the hip/leg joint, probably a lymph gland. Second year: exact same symptoms but less intense, still started antibiotics immediately third: again same but less intense, I ignored it until general full-body joint pain occurred then immediately went on antibiotics, after a few months of that it started to clear up.
- vatsachak 1y agoGlad that your lyme was temporary
- bitexploder 1y agoLyme disease and bacteria are always temporary. The long term disease/syndrome many people attribute to it is something else similar to long COVID and still debated.
- butvacuum 1y ago[flagged]
- ck2 1y agowhenever I need a crash-course on a vitamin or mineral I check the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University for quality info written by and reviewed by Phds https://lpi.oregonstate.edu/mic/minerals/manganese https://lpi.oregonstate.edu/mic/minerals/manganese
- cactusplant7374 1y agoDidn't Pauling fall prey to pseudoscience regarding Vitamin C? It's embarrassing to name an institute after him.
- ck2 1y agoyes he basically created the "vitamin C cult" of the time which is like the "vitamin D cult" of today HOWEVER Linus Pauling was also a legit brilliant chemist that won two nobel prizes and authored over 1000 papers He created "quantum chemistry" and "molecular biology" And was also a big peace activist So he is forgiven for the Vitamin C stuff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling
- _zagj 1y agoBefore you start supplementing with manganese, know that excessive manganese exposure (usually occupationally) is a recognized contributing risk factor for the development of a Parkinson's-like movement disorder: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5272970/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5272970/ https://www.e-jmd.org/journal/view.php?number=335 https://www.e-jmd.org/journal/view.php?number=335
- phyzome 1y agoIncidentally, if your body is either starved of or overloaded with manganese, it also suffers... :-)
- la3lma 1y ago[dead]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kukkeliskuu 1y agoLyme disease seems difficult to understand, as it has features that challenge some basic assumptions how diseases work in general. One such assumption is that borreliosis is always the same. But researchers have been able to capture on video the morphosis of borreliosis spirochets to biofilm, and also spirochets hiding inside red blood cells. Antibiotics apparently only work on some of these forms, thus if you are using antibiotics to cure yourself, you need long-term antibiotics to permanently kill borreliosis. There is actually a whole subculture of hobbyists investigating their own blood samples, prepared in certain way, to capture on video how the borreliosis emerges when the red blood cells die. Lyme is actually not a single disease but a syndrome of borreliosis together with some co-infections. These co-infections appear to work synergistically together. If you reduce the amount of one of them, others increase in numbers, weakening you so that the original co-infection can make a comeback. Also, sometimes curing borreliosis or co-infections can make you feel worse. This is called the Herxheimer reaction. One of the reasons for this seems to be that sometimes the symptoms are actually not due to the co-infections themselves, but toxins that are released in your body when the co-infections die within the body. Thus, the more effective the cure, the more toxins, and you feel worse. If I remember correctly, there are around 40 subspecies of borreliosis. The tests can recognize only few of these. I also remember reading about research where random people (without symptoms) were tested for certain types of borreliosis. If I remember correctly, around 15% tested positive. This means that actually many of us may carry these diseases, but at a level that does not cause symptoms. But if our body is weakened, these diseases may become active.