The Mysterious Syndrome X

Metabolic Syndrome and What You Need to Know About It

If the title of this week’s blog post sounds like a cheesy ‘50s horror movie along the lines of Plan 9 from Outer Space, or even the appropriately-named  X the Unknown,that’s a good thing.  Because like any effective horror movie, Syndrome X, now known by most as metabolic syndrome, should scare you and a lot of my patients.  Because metabolic syndrome is a monster that is running amok in America, killing millions with heart attacks and rendering some into “zombies” with severe strokes.

Sometimes rather than focusing on one lab measurement or one troublesome symptom, we need to look at a constellation of such phenomena, because it is the characteristic patterns of such combinations that may often reveal the most valuable health information. Metabolic syndrome provides a powerful example, as it is defined by a combination of symptoms and measurable indices:

What is Metabolic Syndrome?

Metabolic syndrome is generally defined as a combination of four simultaneously-occurring medical conditions known colloquially as The Deadly Quartet:

• Central (abdominal) obesity
• High blood pressure
• Dyslipidemia
• Insulin resistance

While there is not always a one-to-one correspondence, the presence of any one of these conditions will often reveal  the presence of one or more of the others – either now or in the future.

What is Dyslipidemia?

Dyslipidemia is a term that means your body’s various lipids are dangerously out of balance. There is a delicate interplay between triglycerides, total cholesterol, and the lipoproteins HDL and LDL. That’s why a patient who has a normal total cholesterol level – or a high HDL (often called “the good cholesterol”) – doesn’t automatically get a clean bill of health: it’s only part of the story.

Metabolic Syndrome and Type 2 Diabetes:

People with metabolic syndrome have a much higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, which carries with it a drastically increased risk of coronary artery disease, heart attack and stroke. The exact mechanisms aren’t known with certainty, but insulin resistance is the main culprit. You may be pre-diabetic, which means your blood sugar levels are normal, but you are in danger of developing type 2 diabetes soon because you have borderline insulin resistance; or at the very least, your blood sugar is not being optimally processed, i.e., you do not have good glycemic control. If this describes your situation, you should have us monitor your Hemoglobin A1C level.

Testing your A1C lets you know:

1)      If you are pre-diabetic, what your relative risk level is, and a way to monitor whether diet and lifestyle interventions are having a positive impact on your glycemic control.

2)      If you have type 2 diabetes, the effectiveness of your antidiabetic drug therapy.

Insulin resistance makes obesity more likely. Obesity is associated with high blood pressure and dyslipidemia. Which causes which? It’s hard to know, but they are definitely intimately related. And as anyone living with diabetes can tell you, proper glycemic control is vital to combat an insulin-resistant condition; type 2 diabetics also are much more likely to be overweight and have high blood pressure. Excess glucose not “mopped up” by circulating insulin is thought to create a chronic inflammatory condition. And chronic inflammation, combined with dyslipidemia, is an important driving force in the development of atherosclerosis, which in combination with high blood pressure, leads to cardiovascular incidents, e.g. heart attack and stroke.

What Can I Do To Prevent Metabolic Syndrome

The best ways to prevent metabolic syndrome may seem the most obvious, namely reversing the conditions that make up the problem:

1)      Losing weight around the abdomen

2)      Lowering your blood pressure

3)      Reversing your dyslipidemia

4)      Reversing insulin resistance

If you do item 1) through a sensible diet and exercise plan, then 2-4 will follow. However, sometimes I may prescribe medications to work on the other three, such as antihypertensives to lower blood pressure, statins or other medications to lower cholesterol and triglycerides, and metformin to reduce blood sugar. For mild cases, diet and exercise alone may be enough. For more moderate cases, certain natural supplements may suffice instead of, or as a helpful adjunct to, prescription medications.

What If I Already Have Metabolic Syndrome?

The good news is that metabolic syndrome is reversible! And all the things listed above that can prevent metabolic syndrome can also be used to treat it.  Cases of type 2 diabetes have been completely cured by diet and exercise alone. Even weight-loss surgery (bariatric surgery) that removes a large amount of central abdominal fat has been shown to reverse metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes. I think that’s pretty amazing!

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IV Vitamin C Therapy in Cancer Patients

One of the IV vitamin therapy treatments we offer at the IV Therapy Center of Beverly Hills is intravenous high-dose Vitamin C therapy.  There are manydiseases and conditions for which we have found this treatment to be at least somewhat helpful, and this is backed up by numerous reports in the medical literature.  Our patients have found that IV Vitamin C therapy: 
·         Reduces  allergy symptoms 
·         Shortens the duration of colds and flu (Vitamin C has a known virucidal effect) 
·         Helps boost energy in cases of fatigue; and 
·         Speeds healing after surgery.  

Studies suggest that patients with a history of gout who take over 1,500 mg. a day of Vitamin C have a much lower incidence of painful acute gout attacks. Depression sufferers benefit from it because your body requires Vitamin C to make the key neurotransmitters norepinephrine and serotonin.  And the list goes on. 

The Big C: The Cancer and Vitamin C Connection 
As an IV therapy clinic offering intravenous high-dose Vitamin C, we at the IV Therapy Center of Beverly Hills are occasionally approached by patients with cancer who are seeking to use IV Vitamin C as a so-called “alternative therapy,” even though we do not promote it for this purpose.  Because of the frequent inquiries we receive on this topic, we thought we should give you some background on it, state our positions based on some of the more recent research, and let you make up your mind.

 Background and Initial Skepticism
 Two-time Nobel laureate Dr. Linus Pauling became a crusader for high-dose vitamin C therapy in the ‘70s, touting it as a cure for cancer and many other ailments.  Despite his impeccable credentials, there was - and still is - widespread resistance to the idea. His detractors said there just weren’t any reproducible studies that could prove the dramatic results Pauling claimed. Interest in Vitamin C as a cancer treatment soon waned, and the field lay dormant for over 20 years.

What many people today don’t realize is that Pauling’s initial studies used orally administered Vitamin C; upper dose levels were limited by the fact that the majority of Vitamin C, as a water-soluble vitamin, was excreted in the urine. IV administration combats this problem in that it allows megadoses of active vitamin to be delivered throughout the bloodstream, therefore bringing it into contact with cancer cells all over the body (please see our Benefits page on our site, which discusses this).

A Fresh Look at IV Vitamin C and its Effects on Cancer 
A more recent crop of studies has generated positive results that have researchers cautiously optimistic. In 2006, there was this report of three caseshttp://www.cmaj.ca/content/174/7/937.abstract; 

Then in 2008, we saw this press release from the National Institutes of Health:

Vitamin C Injections Slow Tumor Growth in MiceHigh-dose injections of vitamin C, also known as ascorbate or ascorbic acid, reduced tumor weight and growth rate by about 50 percent in mouse models of brain, ovarian, and pancreatic cancers, researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) report in the August 5, 2008, issue of theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers traced ascorbate’s anti-cancer effect to the formation of hydrogen peroxide in the extracellular fluid surrounding the tumors. Normal cells were unaffected.

How Does Vitamin C Interact with Chemo? 
Some oncologists have worried that Vitamin C might interfere with – or actually undermine – most standard chemotherapy treatments.  If Vitamin C is a safe, relatively harmless compound, why would they even think this? The answer lies in the way chemotherapy works: by destroying fast-multiplying cancer cells. In order to kill cells, cancer or otherwise, you have to give medications that stop cell growth. Stopping cell growth means either stopping DNA from reproducing by fooling it with a DNA base that is essentially a Trojan horse, or by stopping other normal parts of mitosis (the cell-dividing cycle).  Compounds that do this are highly toxic by necessity. When they kill cancer cells, it’s all good. When they kill normal cells (which most chemo drugs can’t discern as being different from cancer cells), patients lose their hair, develop mouth sores, throw up, and suffer a host of unpleasant side effects. 

 Many chemo drugs are oxidants and produce free radicals known as ROS (reactive oxygen species). You already are familiar with certain types of ROS, such as hydrogen peroxide, which perform important functions in the body.  Inside a maniacally reproducing cancer cell, the microenvironment is one in which antioxidants predominate and there’s nary a free radical to be found.  So for cancer patients, antioxidant foods and antioxidant vitamins are a bad thing; here, they only serve to embolden the already-overconfident cancer cells, and – as Nobel prize-winner Jim Watson has argued, to aid and abet the awful process of metastasis.  But Vitamin C is not just an antioxidant; it can be a pro-oxidant too.

The Two Faces of C 
Antioxidant and pro-oxidant properties in the same molecule? Yes, it appears that this strange duality is what exists in Vitamin C. At low doses (under 500 mg), Vitamin C is the antioxidant we’re all familiar with, but at high-doses, under certain physiologic conditions such as cancer being treated with ROD-generating chemo drugs, Vitamin C is an oxidant that is thought to work by generating hydrogen peroxide intracellularly;  this helps the cancer cell-killing process. 

So Where Does This Leave Patients? 
Intravenous high-dose Vitamin C is NOT a cancer treatment in and of itself, nor do we claim it to be such. It should only be used as an adjunct to chemotherapy, radiation and other approved cancer treatment modalities. If you are cleared medically and your oncologist approves, we may administer it as adjunctive therapy to see if it can help improve treatment outcomes. Treatment must be carefully coordinated with your existing regimen.

Intravenous Vitamin C as Supportive Therapy
In addition to the uses described above, high-dose vitamin C has been shown to help reduce the problem of cachexia (wasting syndrome) in cancer patients. So in patients suffering from this troublesome loss of body mass and muscle, IV Vitamin C may be a viable option as nutritional support.

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Why you should enjoy an Avocado more often.

For many years humans have recognized the benefits of the divine avocado fruit. You may know this but you don't know what it is that is in the fruit that provides these great effects. Medically there are four things that can be said and explained about the avocado;

Lutein

Avocados provide your body with lutein, necessary to protect your eyes from age-related eye degeneration.

Lutein Molecule... seriously.

Oleic Acid

Oleic acid improves cardiovascular health as a whole. In addition to Vitamin B6 and folic acid it controls homocysteine levels which are linked to increased risk of heart disease.

Oleic Acid Molecule

High Fiber

Avocados contain more natural fiber than any other fruit. High fiber aids in digestion and helps regulate blood sugar levels.

Foods high in dietary fiber

Antioxidants

Avocados contain the antioxidant “Glutathione”. Glutathione boosts your body’s immune system and keeps your nervous system healthy.

Depiction of foods high in antioxidants

The Mayan Indians have a saying: “Where avocados grow, hunger or malnutrition has no friends.”

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