Discover with Dr. Dylan Foster, DC, PScD, CFMP, ONC, of post chemo nutrition as he reviews a medical journal article from Molecular Pain titled “Expression of Mitochondrial dysfunction-related genes and pathways in paclitaxel-induced peripheral neuropathy in breast cancer survivors”. See how mitochondria dysfunction may play a big role in paclitaxel-induced peripheral neuropathy (PIPN) and why it may be important to address this mitochondrial dysfunction properly. To see this study in it’s full publication please visit: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6293373/
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello, we’re talking about breast cancer and peripheral neuropathies that can be associated with it today. I am Dr. Dylan Foster and today we are going over an article from the Journal of Molecular Pain from 2018 titled, Expression of Mitochondrial Dysfunction Related Gene and Pathways in Paclitaxel-Induced Peripheral Neuropathy in Breast Cancer Survivors. That’s a long, long word there, long sentence. So the reason I’m talking about this today is as you know, I try to do regular series videos on different medical journal articles. And I’m trying to gear it towards more natural-based information. A lot of people are out there looking for natural means to help them. And this one I’m talking about because these peripheral neuropathies, there’s not really anything that can be done in the medical world. So we’re going to show basically not necessarily a treatment per se, but more of what the cause is.
And the cause is right here, as it talks about, mitochondrial dysfunction. Mitochondrial dysfunction. The reason I’m talking about mitochondrial dysfunction, relating it, is because if you go to my website, postchemonutrition.com, you can see a lot of information. I have a lot of different… I have a health quiz you can take to see where you’re at, which actually is based off of mitochondrial dysfunction and how it’s affecting you and your overall health and energy. But, also I have a lot of video and regular blogs in here. But I have research articles. So the research articles are on my two products right now. So if I click on it here, it’s a little slow right now. But if I click on it, we have my two products. So if we click on read the research, you’ll see Cell Revive and Bindatox, both. They have dozens, if not, maybe over 100 articles that justify or explain why I put the ingredients in these products to help people that have been through chemotherapy and radiation therapy, help them get back to feeling good again.
And one of the biggest issues that happens that I’ve found is high levels of mitochondrial deficiency and inflammation is another thing. And so what I’ve made Cell Revive do is it’s designed to help address that. So there’s a lot of information in here on mitochondrial issues with different studies. So I’m going to go down to Mito Cell and Mito Life are a couple of big ones. Gosh, it keeps going. So here’s Mito Life, talking about a lot of different greens in it and how it affects mitochondrial issues. So more mitochondria, more mitochondria, cognitive decline even. So anyway, a lot of research in there, if you’re a big researcher. But you can see that this is why I made Cell Revive and Bindatox, because the research I’ve done through not just my chiropractic training, that was pretty minimal to be honest with you on cancer. It’s more on just being healthy, which is important if you have cancer. You want to be healthy.
So that was our foundational training. But then I got into functional medicine and then nutritional oncology counseling. So I’ve basically spent my entire life of the past, gosh, after school 20, almost 23 years, just doing extensive detailed research on how to get people healthier and feel better. And in my practice, I focus on a lot of chronically ill patients to help them get to feeling good again. And unfortunately, medications weren’t working for them. And so they had to turn to a more natural means, which is what I did. So let’s go back to today’s article and topic from the Molecular Pain Journal and mitochondria. So I’m just going to cover some of the highlights here. It’s kind of a long one. And it’s also very detailed, so we’re just going to cover the highlights.
So if you don’t know what paclitaxel is, it’s one of the most commonly used drugs to treat breast cancer. But it’s also dose… It says major dose limiting toxicity can induce basically a peripheral neuropathy. So, basically the more dose that you get, the higher your risk of getting a neuropathy. And if you have a neuropathy, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you don’t, don’t worry about it. But what I want to point out here is that no interventions are available to treat these neuropathies that come from this medication. No treatments are available. So the conclusion of the study, we’ll just jump right to the conclusion. I’ll get into more of it here. But the study is one of the first of its kind to provide molecular evidence that a number of mitochondrial dysfunctional mechanisms are identified in preclinical models of various types of neuropathic pain, including chemotherapy induced peripheral neuropathies that are found in breast cancer survivors with this persistent neuropathy. And suggest genes for validation as a potential therapeutic target.
So they’re relating this to genes. In fact, the whole case study is going to be a lot of testing on RNA and stuff. We’re not going to get into all that. We’re just going to cover the overview. But as you can tell from what I said before, paclitaxel is one of the most commonly used drugs to treat breast, and ovarian and lung cancers. And it’s dose dependent. Limiting toxicity is what leads to what’s called paclitaxel induced peripheral neuropathy, or they call it PIPN in short. Prevalence rates of PIPN are extremely high, ranging from 59%-87%. And this was good to know because there’s a lot of people that get treatments from different doctors who aren’t so forthcoming on information like this. This is in the journal, 59-87% chance of having a peripheral neuropathy that can stay with you for the rest of your life.
It says here it persists into the cancer survivorship period. So as long as you have survivorship, it persists. And has a negative impact on individuals, your mood, your functional status and quality of life, QOL. So it talks more about it. It alters… Here we go. It alters mitochondrial function through the depletion of your messenger RNAs that encode the mitochondrial fusion and fusion machinery in distal axons, which are your neurons and part of your neurons there. Your nervous system. So basically it affects the mitochondria in your nervous system. That’s basically what we’re saying there. Given the preclinical evidence that paclitaxel alters the mitochondrial function in primary afferent neurons. So those are the neurons, afferent goes to the brain. So basically it’s interpreting information so you can feel… So if you know what neuropathies are, you can feel pain, you can feel tingling, numbness, cold feelings, different sensory losses and exaggerations actually.
So constant tingling is actually just as bad as no sensation. So it goes down. So it gets into the RNA, and the testing and the sequencing they did. We won’t get into that. Very long differential expression. Then they get into demographics. They take into the age, and the year and education. All this stuff is great information, but it’s very, very boring. So we’ll let them do that work. We’ll get the discussion part of it though. So as they put all this together, they say that this study is the first to provide molecular evidence that some of the mitochondrial mechanisms identified in preclinical models of this paclitaxel induced peripheral neuropathy are found in cancer survivors. The Mitotoxicity hypothesis, so the mitochondria’s toxicity, has a hypothesis that proposes that damage to primary afferent sensory neurons.
These are the neurons that go from your body to your brain. Leads to impairments in a variety of mitochondrial functions. Mitochondria is the energy and function of all of our cells. That helps them do what they need to do. Whether it’s nervous system, or filter toxins, or beat your heart, or produce oxygen and help… Well, not produce, but take in oxygen with the lungs and put it up into the body. Paclitaxel opens the mitochondrial permeability transition pore, which is associated with increased regeneration of reactive oxygen species, or ROS as it’s referred to. And this type of oxidative stress leads to structural and functional damage to the mitochondria. So basically what we’re saying is that the medication makes it so that we basically have more damage in the mitochondria. It opens up the pores, makes it more permeable, and we get more damage from reactive oxygen species, which is stuff that comes from environmental pollutants, and toxins and things like that. It makes it worse.
Let’s see what else it says here. Obviously, a lot of information here. I won’t get into too much information on this. The conclusion was pretty much in the beginning. But it does say that there are some limitations. They had a small sample size. I think it was of 50 people. But these are all breast cancer survivors. That some were with the neuropathies and some were without. It also goes into saying obviously more research needs done. More research definitely needs done. And it acknowledges basically what the testing the authors and stuff were doing, and stuff and what they used. Bottom line is what this article talks about is at the beginning, the conclusion. At the beginning here in the first paragraph. So it says that mitochondrial dysfunction is a component for these neuropathies. So if we think about it for a minute, if we help repair mitochondrial dysfunction, shouldn’t that help people feel better? Shouldn’t that help with these neuropathies? I don’t know. You be the judge.
I’ll tell you now, that’s why I developed Post Chemo Nutrition. And I’m not saying that our supplement here, Cell Revive, is a cure all by any means. It’s just a nutritional supplement designed to help you feel better. And if you’re dealing with neuropathies or mitochondrial deficiencies, then this is a great product to give a try to. Bindatox is designed to help pull out toxins and different chemical agents within the body, radioactive buildup from if you’ve done radiation, things like that. So please go to my website, postchemonutrition.com, and look at the research, go through the research and definitely take the test. Go on the homepage, take the help quiz, because it takes into account your overall health, and wellbeing, and where you should be versus where you’re at. So it gives you a baseline to see where you’re at, to know where you can go.
You need a score. That’s how you keep track. And it’s not a supplement designed to be longterm. You don’t need to take it for life or anything like that. It’s just until you feel better. Get that mitochondrial energy back into being reestablished. So if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me. Of course, none of this information is meant to, and designed to be treating any disease or condition. Always seek the advice from your oncologist. But, otherwise this is information, educational information for you to choose to do with what as you wish. Because I’m Dr. Dylan Foster and Post Chemo Nutrition. And I am out of here for now.