By Gary G. Kohls, MD, guest to Natural Blaze

“More than 50 conditions can cause or mimic the symptoms of dementia.” but “Alzheimer’s (can only be) distinguished from other dementias at autopsy.” — from a Harvard University Health Publication entitled “What’s Causing Your Memory Loss? It Isn’t Necessarily Alzheimer’s”

“Medications have now emerged as a major cause of mitochondrial damage, which may explain many adverse effects. All classes of psychotropic drugs have been documented to damage mitochondria, as have statin medications, analgesics such as acetaminophen, and many others.” – Drs Neustadt and Pieczenik, authors of “Medication-induced Mitochondrial Damage and Disease”

“We are at the beginning of the biggest medical tragedy that mankind has ever witnessed. Never before in history has the medical establishment knowingly created a life-threatening nutrient deficiency in millions of otherwise healthy people, only to sit back with arrogance and horrific irresponsibility and watch to see what happens. I cannot help to view my once great profession with a mixture of sorrow and contempt.” –– Peter Langsjoen, MD, Board-certified Cardiologist, discussing the adverse effects of statin drugs that commonly cause serious, difficult-to-detect statin-induced CoQ10 deficiencies in the mitochondria of heart muscle, the central nervous system, and other body tissues. Dr Langsjoen has said that he sees several cases of statin-induced congestive heart failure in his clinical practice each week.

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“It is also noted that instances of pure forms of Alzheimer’s disease, in the absence of other coexistent brain disease processes, such as infarctions or Parkinson’s disease–related lesions, are relatively uncommon.” — Daniel Perl, MD, Mt Sinai School of Medicine (2010)

“Establishing mitochondrial toxicity is not an FDA requirement for drug approval, so there is no real way of knowing which agents are truly toxic.” –– Dr. Katherine Sims, Mass General Hospital – http://www.mitoaction.org

“Big Pharma is engaged in the deliberate seduction of the medical profession, country by country, worldwide. It is spending a fortune on influencing, hiring and purchasing academic judgment to a point where, in a few years’ time, if Big Pharma continues unchecked on its present happy path, unbought medical opinion will be hard to find.” – John LeClarre, author of The Constant Gardener, that focused on the corrupt nature of the pharmaceutical industry.

“Throughout the 20th century, the pharmaceutical industry has been constructed by investors, the goal being to replace effective but non-patentable natural remedies with mostly ineffective but patentable and highly profitable pharmaceutical drugs. The very nature of the pharmaceutical industry is to make money from ongoing diseases. Like other industries, the pharmaceutical industry tries to expand their market — that is to maintain ongoing diseases and to find new diseases for their drugs. Prevention and cure of diseases damages the pharmaceutical business and the eradication of common diseases threatens its very existence.’ — Dr. Matthias Rath – Journal of the American Medical Association, April 15, 1998

“Therefore, the pharmaceutical industry fights the eradication of any disease at all costs. The pharmaceutical industry itself is the main obstacle, why today’s most widespread diseases are further expanding including heart attacks, strokes, cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, osteoporosis, and many others. Pharmaceutical drugs are not intended to cure diseases. According to health insurers, over 24,000 pharmaceutical drugs are currently marketed and prescribed without any proven therapeutic value. According to medical doctors’ associations, the known dangerous side-effects of pharmaceutical drugs have become the fourth leading cause of death after heart attacks, cancer, and strokes.” — Dr Rath (1998)

“The medical industry research is highly fraudulent–yes, a lie. The CDC knows full well that vaccines cause autism but are in bed with the pharma industry. The Affordable Care Act was designed to force people to buy private industry insurance which forces people to use their discretionary income paying for the unaffordable premiums so they will not have the money to pay for holistic forms of healing.” –– Blogger at GreenMedInfo

“Medical journals have devolved into information-laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.” — Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet (March 2004)

‘At least 50% of the articles published in this ever so prestigious journal were not just bad, but downright fraudulent.” — Marcia Angel, MD, who co-edited the New England Journal of Medicine for about 20 years before she was forced out because she questioned the adverse influence of Big Pharma on the NEJM’s editorial policies.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” – Upton Sinclair, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist American author who wrote in the early 20th century

“No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable…for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death.” – President Ronald Reagan, as he signed The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986, absolving drug companies from all medico-legal liability when children die or are disabled from vaccine injuries.

Not so curiously, it turns out that many – perhaps all – of these campaigns have been funded – usually secretly – by the very pharmaceutical companies that can be predicted to benefit financially by promoting the sale of so-called Alzheimer’s drugs (or even vaccinations!). Such corporate-generated public relations “educational campaigns” are increasingly standard procedure for Big Pharma’s drugs, even prior to FDA approval. In other words, many PAOs are primarily front groups for Big Pharma, although many volunteers is such groups are well-meaning and unaware participants. A lot of good can get done in pro-Big Pharma PAOs, if workers watch out for signs of ulterior pro-drug motives.

Big Pharma has found that the promotion, de-stigmatization and demand for drug therapies for so-called “mental illnesses” are great tools for marketing their drugs. which are touted as being “of unknown etiology” or “inherited” and therefore unpreventable, incurable but “manageable” with the life-long ingestion of cocktails of two or more drugs that have never even been tested in the rat lab, much less in clinical situations. (See HERE.)

A year ago, Alzheimer’s support groups – particularly the Big Pharma-subsidized Alzheimer’s Association -aggressively sponsored a documentary that featured the dementia of country singer Glen Campbell. Campbell had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease despite the well-documented fact that Campbell was infamous for his chronic heavy use of brain-damaging, dementia-inducing, addictive, and very neurotoxic drugs like cocaine and alcohol. Therefore, in reality his dementia was most likely caused by his neurotoxic drug abuse which likely was worsened by the fact that he had also used a lot of brain-altering psychotropic prescription drugs simultaneously. Popular performers like Campbell, who are frequently on mentally- and physically-exhausting concert tours, are well-known to over-use chemical cocktails of illicit and legal drugs, which, when used simultaneously, have far worse than additive adverse effects on the body and brain.

The experience of the equally early dementia victim and legendary long-term user of illicit brain-altering drugs, Robin Williams, was similar to Campbell in that both used excessive amounts of psychotropic substances that had adverse effects on their brains, livers and psyches. Williams had recently been diagnosed as having Parkinson’s Disease and Lewy Body dementia (both of unknown etiology!). His desperate act of suicide came in the context of newly-prescribed psychiatric drugs that had been prescribed at Minnesota’s Hazelden facility. The prescription drugs were well-known to cause suicidal thinking.

Over the past several decades, there has been a dramatic increase in the over-prescribing of brain-altering drugs to both adults and children. During the same era there has also been a dramatic increase in the over-vaccinating of mainly infants and children, but also of adults.

And, not coincidentally, during the same era, there have been tens of millions of new dementia victims (“of unknown etiology”) and tens of millions of previously un-heard-of autoimmune disorders, autism spectrum disorders and other chronic illnesses among the over-prescribed and over-vaccinated populations of innocent children. Chronically ingesting brain-altering pills and simultaneously and regularly being injected with neurotoxic vaccines has dire consequences. Big Pharma’s claims of innocence in the face of these epidemics are bald-faced lies. And Big Medicine has been an accomplice in the whole sordid mess. Apologies are in order.

Iatrogenocide

The blatant promotion of largely preventable, iatrogenic disorders does make a lot of money for Big Pharma and Big Medicine, especially if the once-un-conflicted Big Media (the supposed equalizing Fourth Estate) contributes to the mess by consciously preventing open dialogues with the whistle-blowing side of what should be an honest, open, democratic debate.

Tragically, the corporate-dominated media elites appear to have no interest in disturbing the tranquility of the status quo by actually inviting whistle-blowers on to their talk shows. What is going on? I suspect that there is probably too much glad-handing, elbow-rubbing and cross-investing (plus the acceptance of Big  advertising that intimidates and silences) going on  among the many corporate entities that have too much investment in keeping the status quo going strong.

How it Began: Thc Story of Alois Alzheimer

In 1910 a German psychiatrist, Alois Alzheimer, published a case history of a single demented and “mentally ill” female patient who had peculiar microscopic findings in her brain at autopsy. In the article he included drawings of what he had seen. The two findings of 1) neurofibrillary tangles and 2) “senile plaques” became the cardinal signs of the disorder that soon was named after him. The peculiar findings are microscopic and therefore only visible at autopsy. Thus the true diagnosis is not a diagnosis that can be accurately made while the patient is still alive. See the information from Harvard below about the differential diagnosis of AD. Alzheimer’s first and only demented patient that he autopsied also showed a loss of 1/3 of the neurons in her cerebral cortex.

Is the So-called Alzheimer’s Epidemic (of “Unknown Cause”) Actually an Iatrogenic, Drug-and Vaccine-Induced Epidemic That the Medical Profession and Big Pharma are Desperately Trying to Cover Up

The likely answer to that question is yes, and you could say the same thing about the twin epidemics of autistic spectrum disorders and chronic autoimmune disorders among fully vaccinated children in the First World.

Synchronous with the fast-paced over-vaccination agendas over the past several decades that the Big Pharma-, Big Medicine- and Big Business-dominated “first world”, careful, un-blinded, non-conflicted observers are witnessing and documenting the following inconvenient realities:

1) There are huge increases in childhood and adult vaccinations that have intramuscularly-injected neurotoxic, blood-brain barrier-destroying  ingredients such as aluminum, mercury, formaldehyde, glutamate and live viruses;

2) There is the widespread and chronic use of cocktails of psychotropic drugs that are known to cause brain damage, destruction of the blood-brain barrier, mitochondrial toxicity and dementia;

3) There is the widespread use of cholesterol-lowering statin drugs (which also lower the essential, energy-supplying, vitamin-like substance CoQ10) which are known to also cause memory loss, depression and mitochondrial toxicity;

4) There is the ingestion of the neurotoxic substances fluoride and lead that are contaminating many municipal drinking water supplies;

5) There is the wide-spread ingestion of a large variety of toxic and poorly-nourishing food additives that Big Food has put in our Standard American Diet (SAD), such as dyes, NutraSweet, Splenda, trans-fat-containing oils and margarines, MSG, etc, plus toxic contaminants such as Round-Up, genetically-modified substances, livestock antibiotics and other poisonous chemicals that are in virtually all non-organic food; and

6) ETC, ETC, ETC.

Not coincidentally, there has also been a large parallel increase in the following clusters of disorders:

1. the alarming and increasing incidence of chronic diseases, autoimmune disorders of childhood and autistic spectrum disorders (see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/new-study—mitochondrial_b_147030.html);
2. b) the alarming increase in the diagnoses of mental illnesses and dementias of supposedly “unknown origin”.

Both of those categories are conveniently – and falsely – being blamed on “genetics” by the various guilty parties that are actually at least partially responsible. And, it must be noted: there is no credible evidence for claiming any of the above have genetic causes.

Disease entities that have no confirmatory lab tests include such disorders as ASD, Asperger’s, Learning Disorders, ADHD, OCD, Bipolar Disorder, Gulf War Syndrome, “mental illnesses of unknown etiology”, etc, etc. These diagnoses, supposedly of “unknown etiology” are multifactorial realities which, via clever marketing efforts and the studied ignorance of what is actually known about their actual root causes, are being blindly treated with brain-altering chemicals that have no chance of curing anything – including the so-called Alzheimer’s Disease.

It is important to ask and then demand an honest answer to this important question: “Could there be any connection between our nation’s increasingly common over-prescribing of immunotoxic, neurotoxic, mitochondrial-toxic, blood-brain barrier-toxic, synthetic prescription drugs and the CDC and AAP-blessed over-vaccination agendas that are so commonly mandated for disorders that supposedly “have no known cause”? Any grade schooler would respond to that question by rolling their eyes and saying “well of course!”

Could the economically disabling (indeed bankrupting) American epidemic of supposedly “disorders of unknown origin” be found to have recognizable root causes and therefore be curable and, most importantly, preventable, rather than chronically “managed” with unaffordable, disease-inducing prescription drugs that will have to be monitored, changed, renewed or have their dosages adjusted at monthly office visits for the rest of their drug-sickened lives.

The above are extremely important questions, especially in the case of America’s chronic disease epidemics. There are many so-called patient advocacy organizations (PAO) that are heavily funded by major for-profit, corporations that are not donating money out of the goodness of their cold hearts. Such Big Pharma-supported PAOs go to great lengths to hide the financial support they get from their foundations, sugar daddies and assorted investors.

There are hundreds of PAOs that have ulterior motives, and there are many altruistic ones that are barely surviving on shoe string budgets that depend on small donations. The latter PAOs are trying to do the right thing and do not take money from big corporations that are in the game for the money. PAOs like the Alzheimer’s Association, NAMI, MakeItOK, and the American Parkinson Disease Association take a lot of money from Big Businesses and some pretty nefarious Big Money foundations. The leadership of that kind of PAO acts like they are totally unaware of (or willfully ignorant about) the fact that many prescription drugs, especially psychotropic drugs, ARE known to be both dependency-inducing AND a potential cause of irreversible brain damage.

Long-term use of such neurotoxic, psychoactive drugs would be easily expected to worsen any number of neurological (and therefore psychological) disorders because of the brain cell death that easily happens when enough brain cell mitochondria have been wounded or killed off. (Note: See the info on drugs and mitochondria farther below.)

One of the big problems in America’s corporate-controlled culture, media and medical industries is that the giant pharmaceutical corporations, who are in the business of developing, marketing and profiting from their known-to-be toxic drugs and vaccines have a special interest in pretending that there is no known preventable or curable causes for the disorders for which they have products to sell you.

We have all heard the following common and very dis-informational ruse – which is both unproven and simplistic: We are told – by those who want to sell us a drug or vaccine, that “the problem that you have is probably genetic”, implying that the disorder is neither-preventable nor curable. The implication is that the current epidemic of iatrogenic disorders such as the opioid epidemic (“iatrogenic”=”doctor-caused, treatment-caused or prescription drug-caused”) is not the responsibility of Big Pharma’s or Big Medicine’s toxic products or vaccines! And we lemmings, both the drug swallowers and the drug prescribers, to our great shame, all-too-often don’t question the obvious lie.

It should be a concern for everyone who knows or treats demented or Parkinsonian patients, that the most powerful and wealthy and well-staffed PAOs are known to be front groups for the giant pharmaceutical companies that profit handsomely from any number of virtually useless (and definitely not curative) drugs for dementia such as Pfizer’s Aricept, Novartis’s Exelon, Eli Lilly’s Namenda, and Janssen’s Razadyne.

Interestingly, Pfizer announced last month that they were abandoning their increasingly attempts to search for and test new drugs for Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease. They closed the research branches for both classes of disease. Pfizer saw that they were throwing good money after bad, having already wasted billions of dollars on what they now recognize as a futile search for new drugs. Such searches are still being pursued by many other pharma companies – for now. Pfizer’s stock dropped $4 a share on the announcement.

But both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are neurodegenerative disorders whose hallmarks involve permanent brain damage of certain brain areas. Knowing that both diseases are caused by permanent and irreversible brain damage, how any investor could have thought that a chemical or vaccine could have been effective as treatment or cure is beyond me.

However, knowing how cunning these Big Pharma corporations are, I suspect that Pfizer, in the case of its Aricept drug, still made a ton of money selling it. It should come as no surprise to anyone that we prescribing physicians are about as bamboozled by the prevailing corporate pseudoscience and fraudulent advertising as are our patients, whether the commercials come at us from television, magazines, journals or attractive female drug detail reps who come bearing pens, pizzas and post-it notes.

The BBC reported a few days ago that  there were over 100 clinical trials currently being done on Alzheimer’s drugs around the world, but that “more than 99% of trials for Alzheimer’s drugs have failed in the past 15 years.” So, if you are waiting for a cure,  don’t hold your breath. Pfizer likely made a smart move. Expect other drug companies to follow suit soon.

Prescription Drug-Induced – and Vaccine-Induced – Mitochondrial Disorders

As opposed to the rare “primary” or congenital mitochondrial disorders like muscular dystrophy, “acquired” mitochondrial disorders are often caused by commonly prescribed drugs and/or vaccine. They are also generally poorly understood and therefore difficult to diagnose by busy health practitioners. Also – naturally – iatrogenic disorders are rarely made by the physician whose treatment caused the disorder.

When I went to med school, even my professors knew anything about the lethal effects that drugs and vaccines could do to mitochondria, – or even normal brain cells, for that matter. There weren’t that many toxic drugs or vaccines (albeit many of them contained mercury) that could be prescribed back in the good old days. I recall that the function, physiology-and microanatomy of mitochondria were poorly understood back in those years, although our professors did try to teach us med students something about the incomprehensible and soon-forgotten Kreb’s cycle.

Mitochondrial research, especially in the last few decades, has proven the cause and effect relationship between a variety of commonly prescribed medications and vaccines and mitochondrial disorders. That evidence seems to have been cunningly covered-up by the for-profit pharma groups (who control what gets taught in med schools, published in their medical journals or what gets presented at their continuing education courses. Big Pharma appears to even have control over what gets discussed in the mainstream media, especially what is offered to readers by the basically undiscerning “health and science” journalists who do not know much about basic medicine, neuroscience, neurochemistry or micronutrition.

Various other powers-that-be are involved educating most of us because of the serious economic consequences that might happen if any negative information (like what you are reading hers) was allowed in the popular press. The profit-seeking stake-holders in the pharmaceutical and medical industries, most of whom profit mightily from the routine and increasing use of neurotoxic drugs and vaccines would be very displeased if the preceding or following information got out. I submit that Big Pharma’s cover-up of the connections between their drugs and drug-induced disorders is totally unethical and, in the opinion of many whistleblowers, criminal.

An Honest Patient Guide for Dementia Patients (from Harvard!)

So I was pleasantly surprised to recently find a reasonably honest guide for dementia patients on a Harvard University website. These suggestion, contrary to the vast majority of Big Pharma’s products, are compatible with the Hippocratic Oath. (The entire guide can be accessed at HERE)

The information at the Harvard site stated that there were over 50 conditions that could cause or mimic the symptoms of dementia. In other words, there are over 50 conditions that could be mis-diagnosed as Alzheimer’ dementia. I hadn’t been taught anything about that reality when I went to med school, and I doubt that many of my physician colleagues had either. And besides, what medical practitioner in our over-busy, double-booked clinic environment, even if he or she was aware, has the time to thoroughly rule out the 50 conditions when confronted with a patient with memory loss? It’s simpler to just call every case of dementia Alzheimer’s! And nobody ever questions such an authoritative-sounding diagnosis, even though the only definitive way to confirm the diagnosis is at autopsy.

I have often said to my patients and folks who attend my seminars: “it takes only 2 minutes to write a prescription, but it takes 20 minutes to not write a prescription”. And in the current for-profit clinic culture, time is money and few physicians are given the “luxury” of spending adequate time with their patients. (In defense of the physicians that I know, they are not happy about that reality but don’t know what to do about it.)

It is so tempting to use the popularized, but rather squishy label of Alzheimer’s rather than to educate ourselves about the possibility of drug- or vaccine-induced dementia. But what is so important is that many of the 50+ conditions are preventable or reversible, which will be therapeutic only if the conditions are identified before more brain damage from drug-induced or environmental-poison-induced neurotoxicity occurs.

The Harvard guide actually said that “medications are common culprits in mental decline. With aging, the liver becomes less efficient at metabolizing drugs, and the kidneys eliminate them from the body more slowly. As a result, drugs tend to accumulate in the body. Elderly people in poor health and those taking several different medications are especially vulnerable.”

The guide continued with a list of the possible classes of prescription drugs that number in the hundreds:

“The list of drugs that can cause dementia-like symptoms is long. It includes antidepressants, antihistamines, anti-Parkinson drugs, anti-anxiety medications, cardiovascular drugs, anticonvulsants, corticosteroids, narcotics, sedatives.”

The Harvard guide went on to emphasize that Alzheimer’s can only be accurately diagnosed on a post-mortem examination. The guide states that “Alzheimer’s is distinguished from other dementias at autopsy by the presence of sticky beta-amyloid plaques outside brain cells (neurons) and fibrillary tangles within neurons (all indicative of cellular death). Although such lesions may be present in any aging brain, in people with Alzheimer’s these lesions tend to be more numerous and accumulate in areas of the brain involved in learning and memory.”

“The leading theory is that the damage to the brain results from inflammation and other biological changes that cause synaptic loss and malfunction, disrupting communication between brain cells. Eventually the brain cells die, causing tissue loss and cell carcasses or scars.  In imaging scans, brain shrinkage is usually first noticeable in the hippocampus, which plays a central role in memory function.”

But even the Harvard guide inexplicably failed to mention known mitochondrial toxins such as statins (cholesterol-lowering drugs such as Pfizer’s Lipitor), metformin, Depakote, general anesthetics, fluoroquinolone antibiotics, fluorinated psychotropic drugs (like many of the SSRIs and the so-called antipsychotics).

Big Food and Big Vaccine Corporations are Guilty of Causing Chemical Brain Trauma

And here is some more information about the mitochondrial toxins that have gone unrecognized in our environment: This information must be understood, because alone, there may not be huge risks, but in combination with other toxins, they will have additive, if not synergistic (multiplier) adverse effects.

For example, the artificial sweetener NutraSweet (aspartame) is in hundreds of food products and diet sodas that are sold in non-organic food stores. Every molecule of the artificial chemical, when it reaches 86 degrees F [body temp is 98.6 F], releases one molecule of the excitotoxin aspartic acid, one molecule of the adrenalin precursor phenylalanine and one molecule of the cellular toxin methanol [wood alcohol]. Methanol rapidly metabolizes into the known Class A carcinogen and mitochondrial poison formaldehyde [embalming fluid]). Another toxic metabolite of aspartame is diketopiperazine (DKP) which when “nitrosated” in the gut, produces a compound which is similar to N-Nitrosourea, a powerful brain tumor-causing chemical.

The tri-chlorinated sucrose molecule that is sold as another artificial sweetener is called Splenda (sucralose). The synthetic chemical has been marketed as an insecticide in China) and is in many food products. I killed an entire colony of ants in my garden overnight by sprinkling some Splenda on the soil. I then had no idea about how to decontaminate my ant-free garden from the Splenda poisoning.

The above are only a small number of the synthetic chemicals that are capable of causing mitochondrial damage in brain cells – damage that can cause memory loss, confusion and cognitive dysfunction, all early symptoms of dementia.

In summary, it must be regarded as tragic, but all–too-common, for reversible and preventable drug-induced dementias to be mis-diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease “of unknown etiology” and then quickly and reflexively mis-treated with costly, essentially worthless drugs, whose mitochondrial toxicities are ignored.

(The pharmaceutical industry, it should be noted, is not required by the FDA to test its drugs for mitochondrial toxicity, again exhibiting the total disdain for the Precautionary Principle by both industry and the regulatory agencies such as the FDA and the CDC.)

There is much more in the basic neuroscience literature that has been written by un-bought scientists who do not have conflicts of interest with Big Pharma and Big Medicine, that offer proof of the connections mentioned above. The authors of these research and clinical articles have raised the questions and have published the proof that concerned families of patients and their physicians desperately need to know. Sadly, these authors are often black-listed from the major medical or scientific journals that take advertising money from Big Pharma or whose peer reviewers have been co-opted by Big Pharma money or influence.

Don’t expect Big Pharma to respond or to offer apologies or admit to their unethical (or sometimes criminal) behaviors. Do expect denials, delays, dismissals, distractions, or the attempts to discredit the un-biased scientific evidence that exposes subterfuge in the name of maintaining large profits for Big Pharma’s or Big Medicine’s stakeholders.

Here are the abstracts from just two of the many peer-reviewed journal articles that have been published in any number of various science journals that support the thesis of this column.

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Medication-induced mitochondrial damage and disease

Published in the Molecular Nutrition and Food Research journal; 2008 Jul;52(7):780-8.

Authors: Neustadt, J,  Pieczenik SR.

Posted at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18626887

Abstract

Since the first mitochondrial dysfunction was described in the 1960s, medicine has advanced in its understanding of the role that mitochondria play in health and disease. Damage to mitochondria is now understood to play a role in the pathogenesis of a wide range of seemingly unrelated disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disease, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, migraine headaches, strokes, neuropathic pain, Parkinson’s disease, ataxia, transient ischemic attack, cardiomyopathy, coronary artery disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, retinitis pigmentosa, diabetes, hepatitis C, and primary biliary cirrhosis. Medications have now emerged as a major cause of mitochondrial damage, which may explain many adverse effects. All classes of psychotropic drugs have been documented to damage mitochondria, as have statin medications, analgesics such as acetaminophen, and many others. While targeted nutrient therapies using antioxidants or their precursors (e. g., N-acetylcysteine) hold promise for improving mitochondrial function, there are large gaps in our knowledge. The most rational approach is to understand the mechanisms underlying mitochondrial damage for specific medications and attempt to counteract their deleterious effects with nutritional therapies. This article reviews our basic understanding of how mitochondria function and how medications damage mitochondria to create their occasionally fatal adverse effects.

Mitochondrial Dysfunction and Psychiatric Disorders

From: The Journal of Neurochemical Research 2009 Jun;34(6):1021-9.

Posted at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18979198

 Abstract

Mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation is the major ATP-producing pathway, which supplies more than 95% of the total energy requirement in the cells. Damage to the mitochondrial electron transport chain has been suggested to be an important factor in the pathogenesis of a range of psychiatric disorders. Tissues with high energy demands, such as the brain, contain a large number of mitochondria, being therefore more susceptible to reduction of the aerobic metabolism. Mitochondrial dysfunction results from alterations in biochemical cascade and the damage to the mitochondrial electron transport chain has been suggested to be an important factor in the pathogenesis of a range of (so-called) neuropsychiatric disorders, such as (psychotropic drug-treated) bipolar disorder, depression and schizophrenia….Alterations of mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation in (anti-psychotic drug-treated and drug-poisoned) schizophrenia have been reported in several brain regions and also in platelets. Abnormal mitochondrial morphology, size and density have all been reported in the brains of (anti-psychotic drug-treated) schizophrenic individuals. Considering that several studies link energy impairment to neuronal death, neurodegeneration and disease, this review article discusses energy impairment as a mechanism underlying the pathophysiology of some psychiatric disorders, like (psychotropic drug-treated and toxified) bipolar disorder, depression and schizophrenia.

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Read more from Dr. Gary Kohls – Image Source

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Dr Kohls is a retired physician from Duluth, MN, USA.In the decade prior to his retirement, he practiced what could best be described as “holistic (non-drug) and preventive mental health care”. Since his retirement, he has written a weekly column for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns mostly deal with the dangers of American imperialism, friendly fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, and the dangers of Big Pharma, psychiatric drugging, the over-vaccinating of children and other movements that threaten American democracy, civility, health and longevity and the future of the planet. 

Many of Dr Kohls’ columns are archived HERE HERE and HERE.

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