A reader wrote ” I was surprised at how many reds and yellows I have [on Yasko and other panels]. But I’m not sure what the next step is to try and find info about and treatments relating to all of this info? I’m not well and maybe this could help.”

In an ideal world, you would take the panels into your MD and s/he would know exactly how to treat each mutation. The reality is that the vast majority of MDs would not know what to do with the panels, or how to treat different mutations. My own experience recently was with a recent graduate in Internal medicine and apart from a mutation(where she had a cookbook recipe to follow), she wanted to ship all of these issues to specialist (usually 20 years out of medical school and even less aware of DNA panels!).

With CFS, brain fog is common so I am going to write it out as a checklist.

1. Got through all of the panels and list them from highest percentage of RED to lowest risk
2. From the list above, write down in the same order all reds that have a named mutation for them (far left column)
3. You will now start the search for information. Say that the mutation is “GSTP1“, which I used in my prior post on MCS.
   1. First, a mutation may cause many conditions — any thing that helps the condition for those with mutation is GOOD.
      1. If it helps a male with prostate cancer with this mutation, do not dismiss it because you are a woman. We want to treat the mutation and NOT the condition.
   2. For treatment, you will find a small number of actual professional studies, a few speculations from professionals on what could help, many suggestions from people trying to infer what will help from limited knowledge.  Ideally, we want reliable proven treatments, but if such information is not available then we need to tread carefully and make sure that there are no known negative effects from speculations.
4. How to search for the most authoritative information, the best source is PubMed.
   1. GSTP1 Herb – 7+ articles
   2. GSTP1 Supplement – 19+ article
   3. GSTP1 Vitamin – 93+ articles
   4. GSTP1 Treatment -1399+ articles
5. The next step is to work thru these articles, at least to scan them looking for gems. The sequence above is what I found produces the best results in the least articles… with luck I may only need to scan the first 26 articles.
6. If the above fails to find gems, then I take the same phrases and add a “MD” to filter to more authoritative pages.

What did I find for treating GSTP1?

First, for some mutations you can be really lucky, for others you may not find a single bit of useful information. In the latter case, just smile and move on to the next red mutation. In a year, research may have found something.

• roots of licorice (Glycyrrhiza species) [2014]
• Indigofera suffruticosa Mill [2013]
• Andrographis paniculata [2011] [2010][2008][2008]
• tomato and broccoli.[2013] [2011]
• the ability of α-tocopherol (vitamin-E) to affect IL-6 production was influenced by the GSTP1 313 polymorphism [2012]
• supplement of recombinant GSTP1 [2009]
• curcumin (turmeric) [2008]
• “However, in multivariable conditional logistic regression models, we identified a significant interaction between GSTP1 and GSTT1 in relation to  Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)” [2014] – having a MCS parent seems to increase the odds of a ASD child greatly
• “Herbicide exposure modifies GSTP1 haplotype association to Parkinson onset age” [2013] [2006]
• alpha lipoic acid [2010] [2004] – but the 2004 study suggested a very narrow range of action.
•  Lycopene [2008][2002]

While there were many people suggesting Glutathione supplementation (for example Amy Myers MD “Taking glutathione or the precursors (NAC, alpha lipoic acid, milk thistle) often help my patients dramatically with fatigue.”), I was unable to find any PubMed studies on the effectiveness of glutathione supplementation.

So this is my approach, typically it takes 1-2 hours to do a reasonable treatment of a single mutation.