“If I see far, it’s that I stand on the shoulders of giants.”
If you find yourself feeling alone and forgotten in your symptoms, feeling that there’s no one who really cares, please let me emphasize that there are hundreds, even thousands, of neuroscience researchers, medical doctors with PhDs, biochemists, psychopharmacologists, and psychiatrists who have been painstakingly searching for the answers you need for your suffering for generations, and millennia. You can feel alone, but there’s a host of people who have your back.
After eons of exploration, and hundreds of generations have suffered without remedy, we are living in an amazing time when solutions are emerging.
We’ve learned that the mild-mannered anesthesia medicine, ketamine hydrochloride, has been hiding in plain sight for nearly five decades, all along carrying within it the power to potentially transform your crippling depression, PTSD, and social anxiety into resilience, remission, fulfillment…and a rewarding life.
It was right under our noses, but we were missing it…
What else is lurking in plain sight that may hold the secret to relief for millions of people?
More to Learn to Relieve Psychiatric Disorders
While the vast majority of severely ill patients has been enjoying a life they’d not been capable of enjoying until they were treated with IV ketamine, there were still those who seemed to be unaffected and un-helped by it. We haven’t known why.
And even some of those who seemed unaffected and un-helped by ketamine treatment, began to improve in a slowly spreading glow until they too achieved remission months later.
And we learned about genetic alleles for BDNF that may indicate an individual’s responsiveness to treatment, and clinical indicators associated with treatment response.
Now we’ve been learning even more. About deficiencies of nutrients that can cause depression and other disorders. One of these deficiencies has been exposed as a key factor in autism. And when the deficiency was treated with high doses, the symptoms of autism diminished!
Who knew?
Right under our noses. Sometimes it takes generations of exploration passed down through generations of researchers to find the answers we’re looking for … which were lurking in plain sight.
We’ve talked about how a deficiency in testosterone can be a culprit blocking remission from depression.
Another BIG player is cerebral folate.
Cerebral Folate Deficiency
Folate is vitamin B-9, and provides important services throughout the body. In the brain, it plays an important role in neurotransmitter production. So when it’s deficient, the neurotransmitters tend to be produced more slowly.
You can read the label on your breakfast cereal box and see that it contains folic acid. But folic acid can’t cross the blood-brain barrier, which is there to protect the the brain from fluctuations that can interfere with its function.
Only in the form of folinic acid or methylfolate can folate reach the brain. And to do that it has to have a transport, called the folate receptor alpha, to take it there.
So to get B-9 into your brain to do its part in the neurotransmitter factory, it has to be in a certain form that can get through the security gate of the brain, known as the blood-brain barrier. Plus, it has to hitch a ride on a specific type of truck, and that truck has to be a specific model – the “low affinity folate transporter.”
It’s not hard to picture that a brain can get low on this stuff. So many hoops to jump through!
How Cerebral Folate Deficiency Can Affect You
And interestingly, most of the research about this has involved infants and children. In fact, the story of folate in the brain has a gripping history. It involves autistic children and infants with severe neurological disorders..but as those discoveries made their way into adult psychiatry.…
Well, we’re talking about it now because it turns out that adults have deficiencies too…and this is a deficiency that may contribute to why your depression seems treatment-resistant — but the problem is not that hard to treat. Which is good news…really good news.
In fact, if we find you’re treatment- resistant because of folate deficiency, we can prescribe folinic acid or l-methylfolate to treat the deficiency. Then, you may find you’re not treatment-resistant any more. Sound like a plan?
This is BIG news.
What this means is that some people who don’t get better with ketamine treatment, may just need their folate deficiency restored so their neurotransmitter factory can crank up again and turn out those much needed neurotransmitters.
Then, ketamine has what it needs on hand to help you get dramatically better.
Isn’t that amazing??
Researchers Paved the Way
In 2005, Dr. VT Ramaeker defined cerebral folate deficiency as “any neuropsychiatric disorder involving problems getting enough folate into the brain.” He was referring to the infants he treated. They had severe neurological illness, and happily, many of them responded to high doses of folinic acid.
Then, in 2013, Dr. Richard Frye studied 93 pediatric patients with autism and found that 75.3% had cerebral folate deficiency. He also found that those patients who had a cerebral folate deficiency also had antibodies to the folate receptor alpha — that specialized transport truck that takes the folate into the brain.
The following year, we’re back to Dr. Ramaeker, who measured cerebral folate in 18 patients with treatment-resistant schizophrenia…and you guessed it! 15 of them had cerebral folate deficiency. He treated 8 of them with high doses of folinic acid and 7of them got better.
Now, I should explain that finding the level of folic acid in the brain is a bit more involved than lab work. It requires a lumbar puncture so the folic acid in the cerebrospinal fluid can be measured. The measure of folic acid found in the cerebrospinal fluid is then multiplied by 1.5 to find the level in the brain.
Then, in 2017, Dr. Lisa Pan measured folic acid in 33 patients with treatment-resistant unipolar depression. 12 of these had cerebral folate deficiency and 10 out of those 12 responded after high doses of folinic acid.
Google’s Take on Folate and Cerebral Folate
When you google “folate,” you get all sorts of links about how folate is needed in your body. It helps make red and white blood cells in the bone marrow, convert carbohydrates into energy, and manufacture RNA and DNA.
(Hmmmm, makes you stop and think about BDNF. How it turns on mRNA to switch on DNA so the synapses proliferate and rebuild circuitry in the brain… interesting…)
But when you google “cerebral folate,” you find yourself reading about autism, and about treating it with folinic acid.
Cerebral Folate Deficiency Causes Tragedies
Cerebral folate is so important in the brain, that the lack of it causes all sorts of tragic results…. in infants, neural tube defects, spina bifida, cleft palate…
To think that autism, schizophrenia, and depression show links to cerebral folate deficiency — in at least some people — pushes us and the psychiatric and neuroscience research community to learn more about the central role that l-methylfolate and folinic acid play in the the central nervous system and in the genesis of psychiatric disorders.
These early important studies should prompt more extensive clinical studies. And they should prompt more interest in testing our patients with treatment-resistant disorders for this deficiency so that we can treat it sooner rather than later, don’t you think?
Unfortunately, that’s not as easy as it sounds. But it’s a start for us to realize this B vitamin is essential to our health and wellbeing. And just might be the key to your treatment-resistant disorder.
Treating Deficiencies in Vital Nutrients Helps You Thrive
At Innovative Psychiatry we test for cerebral folate deficiency when we suspect it could be a cause of treatment-resistance. We prescribe treatment for it to help improve your response to your treatment, including ketamine, and in turn, potentially improve your resilience and remission.
If you suffer from treatment-resistant depression, and think you might be a candidate for ketamine treatment, call us. We’ll do an evaluation to learn more about you and your illness. We can also order testing to help ensure your best outcome with IV ketamine treatment.
With so many who have gone before us, shining the light brighter so we can better see the obstacles to your joy, we’re here to help you find the life you ache to live.
I believe that I suffer from cerebral folate deficiency. Can I take an over the counter supplement for this or is a prescription needed? Thanks
Although I cannot give personal medical advice here, there is an over-the-counter form of folic acid which has much better penetrance into the central nervous system, called l-methylfolate and it is available in a 15 mg tablet. But there is testing available to try to determine if you have true cerebral folate deficiency and there are other options used to treat that, including folinic acid.