I should also probably mention that I also take an additional 400 mg thiamine, 400 mg riboflavin, 300 mg pantethine, 1 mg adenosylcobalamin, 1 mg hydroxocobalamin (they're 50/50 in a 2 mg sublingual tablet) daily as separate supps. There's never enough riboflavin or thiamine in any B complex for me. And 5 mg biotin cap every third day or so (Swanson's stopped making the 1 mg biotin caps which also pissed me off).
Hello Dutchykins. Thanks for your posts.
You're right about folic acid and folate. I had forgotten about the activated versions of Swanson's B complexes
You seem to be taking specifically a mito-boosting mix of supplements. You may be interested in clinical recommendations on supplements for mito disease such as Table 2 on page 18 in "A Modern Approach to the Treatment of Mitochondrial Disease" in this link although different docs emphasise different supplements.
https://www.ncbi.nlm...nihms162564.pdf .
I too take additional standalone B vitamins, often in very high doses with a similar mix to the ones you mention. I find high dose methylfolate is good too. Perhaps I should replace my B complexes with their individual ingredients.
I also take 1000mcg B12 as methylcobalamin three times a day. Sometimes I might take 500mcg cyanocobalamin because I recall reading it was not as crap as is widely thought. How well do you find your combined adenosyl and hydroxo variants work for you? They are pricey especially because I would take 2 or 3 doses a day (B12 is not known to help with mito problems but nevertheless I find it does something useful within 30 to 60 minutes of taking it. I know there's a whole world of folks such as those at Phoenix Rising who are taking B12 and folate variants as part of a methylation strategy which I have never managed to understand.)
Aye, as I mentioned before, I take a lot of mitochondrial support supps for migraine prophylaxis. Other problems too, but migraines are what set me on this path and are still the primary goal.
I also take 1 gram creatine (micronized), 1 gram l-carnosine, 500 mg lysine every second day, a high-DPA high-DHA low-EPA fish oil every third day, 200 mcg ChromeMate (niacin-bound chromium), low-dose lithium every third day, and modest doses of the fat-soluble vitamins. Then some ginger, lion's mane, artichoke extract and forskolin. And Zrytec and 10 mg memantine.
Migraine does involve some kind of mitochondrial dysfunction (low cell energy is a strong trigger for the excitotoxic cascade because it can cause a nasty feedback loop with extracellular glutamate and calcium ions) and this is why double-blind placebo-controlled studies have found that high dose riboflavin has some prophylactic efficacy especially in migraine without aura (aka common migraine; migraine with aura is called classic migraine). I get two kinds of headache; common migraine and cluster headache. The clusters are rarer but can be the worst and last much longer (longest one I had was 8 days but this was way back in the early years before I began learning and altering my lifestyle). Migraine also involves glutamatergic and dopaminergic dysfunction, but both of those seem to tie back into mitochondrial dysfunction. There are still a lot of unknowns about migraine.
My initial experimentation with methyl donors led me to a scary potassium crash. I fixed that but I was very irritable on the methyl supps, similar to the way citrate compounds bother me (such as 400 mg magnesium, calcium or potassium citrates).
High doses (1 mg) of methylcobalamin bother me. As do high doses of methylfolate, big time. As does TMG and SAMe. Sometimes curcumin. But 300 mg CoQ10 does not bother me, nor 250 mg doses of theanine (x 2 day), nor 1 gram l-carnitine, nor 0.5 mg melatonin (which I don't take regularly).
I like to rely on fresh baby spinach for extra folate and potassium, rather than taking a higher dose B complex, but that's probably just because I literally love to eat spinach by the handful out of the bag... even get intense cravings for the stuff if I go more than a few days without it. But doing it that way is trickier since the spinach starts losing its folate content the longer it's in the fridge (and including the time from cutting to washing to bagging and transporting to the store). Luckily I live in California's "salad bowl" county.
Adenosylcobalamin works wonders for me. The hydroxocobalamin is just there for the hell of it - it's the inactive cobalamin that bacteria produces via fermentation (for example, this is the form of cobalamin foregut fermenters get from the bacterial fermentation colonies in their stomachs - which they then have to convert to adenosylcobalamin and methylcobalamin and distribute throughout the body). I take the 50/50 because it's merely the cheapest 1 mg adenosylcobalamin I could get my hands on.
Cyanocobalamin is usually bacteria-fermented hydroxocobalamin passed through a cyanide compound to create something that is very shelf-stable and cheap. It's proven effective at treating clinical cobalamin deficiency but yes, it's also slightly more useless/difficult for the body to utilize as it not only has to convert it to the bioactive forms, it must first use time and resources to remove the cyano group from the cobalamin molecule, neutralize the cyano group, and dispose of it. Since all of this is a more complicated, multi-step process, some people will not find cyanocobalamin as effective as others, and some may even react badly to it. Everyone has unique biochemistry and ever-so-subtle mutations that can come into play here.
Last time I checked in the medical community, only America uses cyanocobalamin in B12 shots by default, going to the hydroxocobalamin if the doctor feels like it. Most other countries use hydroxocobalamin by default. Things could have changed since then but I haven't bothered to look.
It's important to note that both bioactive forms of cobalamin (adenosyl and methyl) are needed for different jobs in the body, and that methylcobalamin is overly popular in the general public for no good reason (industry advertisements, mostly, all this fuss over MTHFR). Your body can make methylcobalamin from adenosylcobalamin but not vice versa (if I remember correctly).
After running my and my daughter's DNA through 23andme (we did this after my daughter's referral to Stanford Pediatric Genetics dept), things started to make a lot more sense.
I was later able to use several of those little gene tools to identify where I was going wrong with some of my supplements, and now have reached a place where I longer feel compelled to continue searching and tweaking my supplement regimen. I like what's been going on over the past year and a half since the last tweaks to my regimen.
I'm not too sure about the Phoenix Rising forums since there is a lot of silly information on the internet about methylation mixed up with the useful information.
Sometimes there is someone in a thread that is reasonable and armed with the proper information. But sometimes the other kind of people are in a thread that are just generally irrational and parroting pop culture rumors and bullshit they read from dubious health gurus or supplement manufacturers. All claims must be checked against medical literature or other reliable sources.
Edited by Duchykins, 20 March 2017 - 06:28 PM.
