Carnitine

Carnitine

Carnitine is important in the metabolism of fatty acids in the mitochondria. A defect in the carnitine cycle can cause various deficiencies including cardiac arrythmias, weakening, and confusion. Supplementing the bodies pool of carnitine with L-Carnitine can help with a decreased carnitine amount.

A joke at every end:

An elephant walks up to a naked man and says
"It's cute but can you breathe through it?"

Quick Thoughts

N Engl J Med. 2008 Jan 24;358(4):353-61 --> 4/5 patients with end stage renal disease were weened off immunosuppressive therapy 9-14 months after receiving a kidney from a mismatched donors.

Ideas: Bone marrow transplantation from the donor helped diminish the recipients immune response against the foreign organ. The bone marrow transplant achieved a "lymphohematopoietic chimera".

• Treat Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) with a bone marrow transplant of a healthy same match donor. Some believe that CFS is an immune system disorder where the immune system is up regulated. One particular virus, HHV-6, has been recently linked to CFS and is known to preferentially infect CD4+ T lymphocytes. Could a full bone marrow transplant regenerate functioning CD4+ cells or just reboot the immune system?

Brain. 2008 Mar;131(Pt 3):866-76. --> music can enhance cognitive recovery and prevent negative mood after a stroke. "Listening to pleasant music activates an interconnected network of subcortical and cortical brain regions, which includes the ventral striatum, nucleus accumbens (NAc), amygdala, insula, hippocampus, hypothalamus, ventral tegmental area (VTA), anterior cingulate, orbitofrontal cortex and ventral medial prefrontal cortex"

• There is a theory that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is caused by an improper cycle in the brain. It is hypothesized that stress causes the amygdala to be highly sensitized to any negative physical symptoms arising from the body. The amygdala assigns significance to cognitive or sensory input and creates a network of neurons that amplify the bodies response to physiological events. One proposed treatment method is cognitive therapy. Verbal stimulation and meditation should theoretically activate the amygdala and weaken the correlation between certain physiological or mental events and the negative symptoms associated with CFS. As music has been shown to activate various networks in the brain, maybe we can use musical therapy to rebuild the neuronal connections that might be involved in this disease?

A joke at every end:

Why do farts smell?
To make deaf people laugh.

Fatigue

Thank you anonymous reader for the comment to my previous post.

Per your excellent comment, the correct version of the Buddha joke is as follows:
Buddha walks up to a hot dog stand
The vendor asks "what would you like?"
Buddha replies "make me one withe everything."

In regards to the news, an important study has been highlighted recently. Dr. Andrew R. Marks (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2008, 105, 2198) at Columbia University has shown that the complex (RyR1 macromolecular complex) that shuts the calcium channels found in the sarcoplasmic reticulum (pictured right) is looser after strenuous exercises. The calcium leak causes a smaller force from contracting muscle and activates a protein, calpain, that could lead to muscle damage.

The authors commented that this is a possible explanation for long term muscle fatigue unexplained by lactic acid build up (causes the short term pain following bursts of exercise).

Marks et al. identified a compound that improves the RyR1 integrity during exercise and minimizes fatigue in muscle. A compound named S107 decreased the depletion of Calstabin1 from the RyR1 complex, thus improving overall stability during exercise.

This study is of interest for many reasons. As mentioned by the authors, a similar calcium leak has been found in heart failure patients. Implications for a treatment are clear.

Other disease entities should be considered at this point. For example, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, is characterized by prolonged fatigue and malaise 24-36 hours post exertion. The 24-36 hour absence of fatigue is intriguing in the context of this study.

In further posts I hope to explore the mechanism of action for S107 and the implication of differentiating the fast and slow twitch muscle fibers.

A joke at every end:

A couple goes on a trip to Israel. They bicker at the wailing wall and the dead sea. In Jerusalem, the bickering continues. Every visit to a synagogue is marked by a fight. One day the wife passes away. The husband goes to a Rabbi and asks for options. The Rabbi says, "You can ship the wife back to America for 15 thousand dollars or bury her body in the holy land of Israel, your historic birth land, for only $150."
The husband, without hesitation, says "I'll ship her back to America."
The Rabbi is stunned "why would you spend all this money to send her away from this holy land."
The husband replies, "this is the same holy land where a man was buried for three days and came back to life. I am not taking any chances."