How
to Use Blood Testing to Increase Your Resilience to COVID
Analysis by Dr. Joseph MercolaFact
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STORY AT-A-GLANCE
·
A biomarker panel can
help you identify underlying chronic infections that might be sabotaging your
health, contributing to chronic disease and raising your risk of severe COVID-19
·
A number of infectious
pathogens can trigger chronic diseases that also predispose you to more severe
COVID-19. Primary culprits include bacteria involved in periodontal disease and
chlamydia pneumoniae, a respiratory pathogen that 60% to 70% of older adults
have antibodies against
·
Chlamydia pneumoniae
plays a role in several common age-related conditions, including Alzheimer’s
disease, heart disease and rheumatoid arthritis
·
If you have elevations
in white blood cell markers, then you likely have an infectious process going
on in your body. There’s also a direct correlation between antibody levels and
the risk of disease; the higher your antibody level, the greater your risk of
chronic disease
·
The Health Revival
Partners’ panel tests for markers that are modifiable through lifestyle
interventions and specific treatments for underlying comorbidities including:
immune health status, clotting factors, chronic infections, tissue destruction
markers and auto-antibodies
In this interview, Thomas
Lewis, Ph.D., and Dr. Michael Carter explain how biomarker panels can help you
take control of your health by identifying underlying chronic infections that
might be sabotaging your health. Lewis is a microbiologist with a Ph.D. from
MIT and certifications from the Harvard School of Public Health and Carter is
an integrative physician.
They run a company that performs
diagnostic testing to guide patients through a process of diagnosing various
ailments. Biomarkers such as D-dimer, fibrinogen, clotting factors and auto
antibodies, which are largely ignored by the mainstream, can clue you in on
where you lie on a health/disease continuum.
Importantly, poor COVID outcomes are rare
unless you have two or more comorbidities, and in the last year, they’ve
developed a more refined way of assessing an individual’s COVID-19 risk using a
panel of specific markers associated with inflammation and blood clotting.
Their testing helps YOU understand where
you are on the health-disease continuum. In their model, you are not either
sick or well — you are somewhere on this continuum. Find out where you are and
then work to improve your status.
“Really, it's your chronic health status
that helps you figure out where you are in the continuum for COVID risk,” Lewis
explains. The same goes for the COVID shot. According to Lewis, whether you got
COVID-19 or the vaccine, the risk factors that determine whether you’ll have a serious
bout of COVID-19 or experience more serious adverse events from the shot are
identical.
The Role of Underlying Infections
Underlying or latent infections can play a
significant role not only in chronic disease but also in SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Judy Mikovits, Ph.D., has pointed out the role of retroviruses and coinfections
with pathogens such as borellia and babesia in leading to less favorable
outcomes in COVID.
Her hypothesis is that SARS-CoV-2 in and of itself is not the primary cause of COVID-19. She’s convinced there must be a coinfection along with SARS-CoV-2 that suppresses or compromises your immune system in order for symptomatic COVID-19 to occur.
Primary among those are bacteria involved
in periodontal disease (periodontitis). You don’t have to have oral issues or
root canals to have a high burden of periodontal pathogens. The Lewis/Carter
team test for these pathogens using an oral DNA home test kit.
Another is chlamydia pneumoniae, a
respiratory pathogen that 60% to 70% of older adults have antibodies against.
Chlamydia pneumoniae plays a role in several common age-related conditions,
including Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease and rheumatoid arthritis.
Unfortunately, few are ever tested for the presence of this organism.
According to Lewis and Carter,
inflammatory markers and clotting markers such as C-reactive protein,
fibrinogen, uric acid, the neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio, D-dimer, and
sedimentation (SED) rate are strongly associated with innate immune response
activity and chronic infections, which in turn correlate with COVID-19
severity.
“What's tricky about these organisms is they don't
always show up from the classic acute perspective of diagnostic,” Lewis says. “If you talk to any infectious disease
doctor that's not functional in nature, they'll say that the IgG antibody is
historic. But I can guarantee you they're completely wrong.
They're not looking at things from a chronic, stealth
[perspective]. Do we think chickenpox, the herpes zoster virus, is the only
organism that can cause problems and then go dormant and reactivate when you're
immune-compromised later in life? No.
Every single one of these organisms has a potential opportunity
to go from an acute phase to a chronic phase. Some never even express acute
disease. They just hang out in biofilms and will express in the chronic phase
later in life, causing disease of “unknown” origin!
It's called crypticity, which makes it extremely
difficult to create, in the minds of doctors and researchers, the association
between the disease and the exposure. Sometimes these exposures are congenital.
They happened pre-birth. So, that's really the art.”
So, to clarify the hypothesis presented by
Lewis and Carter, the conventional view is that these infections, once they've
generated an IgG antibody response, no longer pose a threat to your body. But
this isn’t the case.
They can indeed lay dormant only to later
contribute to chronic diseases that, on the surface, appear to have nothing to
do with a pathogenic infection. The book by Paul Ewald titled, “Plague Time:
The New Germ Theory of Disease,” written in 2000, explains well this conundrum.
How to Identify Underlying Infections
The clinical approach to identifying
whether an underlying infection is at play in a particular disease is to look
at antibody levels. Immunoglobulin G (IgG) is reflective of long-term
protection and also happens to be the most common antibody, found in blood and
other body fluids. It protects against both viral and bacterial infections and
tends to be elevated when the infection has reached a chronic state.
Immunoglobulin M (IgM) is associated with
acute responses to infections and is found primarily in your blood and lymph.
It’s the first antibody to be made when your body encounters a new pathogen.
Carter explains:
“Everyone has a baseline level of IgG and IgM,
especially in the acute phases, but the long-term IgG, once it is above the
normal background level, then in many cases, especially in those who are
symptomatic with various diseases, there is reactivation of that virus,
bacteria, parasite or other pathogen, what have you — any grouping of these
organisms that can smolder and cause disease patterns.
The driver is inflammation and tissue destruction. The
mechanism is simple. We all have some “wear and tear.” These organisms increase
wear and tear so your “repair and recovery” pathways cannot keep up.
We also — even without doing those IgG levels, just on
our basic platform of biomarker testing — can see things in the complete blood
count where, let's say our white blood cell count has a ‘normal range’
somewhere between 3.8 and 10.8 depending on the lab. But that's a very wide
normal range.
Really, anything above 6.2, in terms of your white
blood cell count, is an indicator that something is brewing. When we start
looking deeper at the neutrophils, the lymphocytes, the basophils, the
monocytes and eosinophils, when those values are increased or decreased beyond
the optimal range, we can tell that there are critters being unruly even though
you don't have fever, chills or a classic increase in white blood cell count.
So, we know that these pathogens are present in
everyone. It's really incumbent upon your own immune system to be vigilant to
keep them at bay and stop them from replicating.”
In summary, if you have elevations (or
suppressions) in white blood cell markers, then you likely have an infectious
process going on in your body. There’s also typically a direct correlation
between your antibody level and the risk of disease, so the higher your
antibody level, the greater your risk of chronic disease and poor COVID / JAB
outcomes.
PCR testing can be useful for identifying
a specific pathogen. However, if excessively high cycle thresholds (CTs) are
used (as has been the rule when testing for SARS-CoV-2), the test becomes
useless, as it can find even a single molecule if run at a high-enough CT. So,
the CT needs to be below 26 to avoid false positives.
Review of Lewis and Carter’s Research
Before we go further, here’s how Lewis
describes their research, and how it can improve your health and medical
decisions:
“Carter and I are not researchers. We like to fancy
ourselves translators of best clinical research. There’s really great science
published, but medicine is a business decision. Less than 1% of the great
medical research makes it to clinical practice.
We had the opportunity to evaluate 100 people at a
Fortune1000 company. Based on that, we made an assumption that, because of
their health status, 42 of them had some sort of an infectious process.
So, we were given license to test IgM, IgG, bacterial
[and] viral. Forty-one of 42 were positive using our testing. Now, we're not
looking for everything in the universe. We're telling the lab what to look for:
what we call ‘usual suspects.’ Some of them had IgM and IgG, and some of them
just had IgG with a negative IgM for a single or multiple pathogens.
When we treated them over nine months, everyone got
better. What was remarkable is IgG levels [indicative of chronic infection]
came down. When someone had a negative IgM but a positive IgG and symptoms, and
their IgG level came down, they got better too. This proves that IgG is
indicative of the presence of a “hidden” but chronically active infection.
So that's not an extraordinarily scientific
evaluation, but it's completely consistent with the work of folks like Charles
Stratton out of Vanderbilt, who's written about chlamydia pneumoniae and its
three different life forms.”
There are many other researchers and clinicians who
have come to this conclusion. Lewis and Carter are in the process of publishing
a peer-review medical paper that references many other publications explaining
how important an IgG antibody test is.
Treating Chronic Versus Acute Infections
Carter and Lewis have developed a
pretreatment program, followed by a variety of treatment strategies aimed at
chronic infections. As you might expect, the chronic infection treatments
involve more aggressive approaches, and will depend on whether the infection is
caused by bacteria, viruses or parasites.
The biggest factor for effective treatment
is eradicating pathogens hiding in biofilm, which takes time. (We do not
address the use of specific remedies in this interview, as each patient must be
tested, seeing how there’s such a broad array of potential causal factors.)
As noted by Lewis, even if you use a broad-spectrum
anti-infective, such as ozone, you’ll rarely eradicate enough of the chronic
phase of these organisms, as they shelter inside biofilms or inside your cells
— including your white blood cells. that are very difficult to get into. These
pathogens are often referred to as “obligate intracellular pathogens.” The
“obligate” part infers that these harmful organisms rob your energy by mimicing
to be your mitochondria. He explains:
“For long periods of time, you have to maintain a
physiologically anti-infective dose. The other piece of it that we've learned,
[and which] everybody knows much better now because of COVID-19, is the
inflammatory component. There's no question that the inflammatory response can
override, go too far, even in chronic conditions.
There's a brilliant paper by Australian groups that
talk about cytokines, anti-inflammatory treatments and their clinical
relevance.
The biggest problem we face is that, if you bang your
elbow and your brain at the same time with the same sort of force, your elbow
will recover in a couple weeks, but the brain perpetuates inflammation much
longer, and sometimes forever. Consider traumatic brain injury as an example.
It happened one time a while ago, but your brain stays “inflamed.”
So, every treatment has to consider an infectious
[risk], has to consider lifestyle risks, and help you optimize those things.
But generally, there has to be a very strong anti-inflammatory component, which
… has to be rigorous and continuous. That's the big challenge …
Dr. Stratton at Vanderbilt has shown that these
organisms can live in an elementary body, a reticular body, and a “cryptic”
phase. In some of these phases they're completely refractory [i.e., resistant]
to antibiotic treatment …
J. Thomas Grayson, 95 years old, [a doctor of]
preventive medicine at University of Washington … showed that … when it comes
to organisms like chlamydia pneumoniae, you have to treat for one year. That's
scary for people, so what we do is we do three-month segments and then retest.
Obviously, we measure for symptoms, but also the IgG.”
The Role of Vitamin D
A basic intervention that is really
important for shoring up your immune system is vitamin D. Vitamin D is really a
pro-hormone and hormones regulate physiological processes. I believe vitamin D
optimization — making sure your blood level is between 60 ng/mL and 80 ng/mL
(150 nmol/L and 200 nmol/L) — is one of the easiest, least expensive and most
important things you can do to avoid infections of all kinds, including
COVID-19.
The activated form of “vitamin” D is
produced in your liver when you have an infection and it is strongly
antibiotic. Lewis and Carter recently completed a study in which they looked at
the vitamin D level compared to neutrophil and lymphocyte ratio. Lewis
explains:
“Neutrophils go up with bacteria. Lymphocytes often go
down with viral infections, so [your neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio] is sort of
a measure of your overall infectious burden.
What we did recently, and we're putting this into a
paper we'll be publishing, is a study of neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio versus
blood 25 hydroxy vitamin D levels. We saw a very clear linear relationship
between a bad neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio count and low vitamin D, and then
just the opposite.”
They’ve also found a similar correlation
between chronic infection and free cholesterol (not total cholesterol). This
correlation appears particularly strong in those with cancer, who typically
have a free cholesterol level of 50 ng/mL and above. An optimal level is
thought to be somewhere between 5 ng/mL and 20 ng/mL, with the healthiest of
people typically falling between 5 ng/mL and 15 ng/mL.
When free cholesterol is elevated, you’re
more prone to tissue destruction, as cholesterol is an important repair
molecule. Since your cholesterol level can indicate your tissue repair
capability, it is also included in Lewis’ and Carter’s COVID panel.
“Cancer patients are, I think, just the tip of the
iceberg in terms of people that have some virulent infectious process that is
destroying tissue,” Lewis
says. “I'm
pretty sure we're going to see a very strong correlation to your free
cholesterol number as part of the portfolio of tests you want to do to
investigate what is going on inside your body.”
How Do You Know if an Infection Is
Chronic?
One way to determine whether you’re
suffering from an acute or chronic infection is to look at the half-life of the
factors being measured. Lewis explains:
“If you take a test now and in three months and you
see a sustained trend of biomarker elevation, that's obviously a way to relate
it to chronic infection. But in a single test, every biomarker has a half-life.
Red blood cell distribution width, because it's tied to red blood cells, it'll
stick around for four months.
It has a much longer half-life than say C-reactive
protein. If you bang your knee, [C-reactive protein] will go way up, then come
down with the half-life of one and a half days.
Fibrinogen is seven days. When you understand
half-lives, then when you look at a single lab and they're all elevated to sort
of the exact same extent above what we consider our baseline, then we know it's
chronic, or at least with a very educated guess, that it's in the chronic
phase.”
What’s in the Panel?
Speaking to the issue of what the panel
Lewis and Carter developed contains, Carter explains:
“A typical panel … is a very concise panel of blood
biomarkers. We expand that with the inflammatory markers that really play a
role [in chronic infections].
So, if your homocysteine and C-reactive protein are
up, these are key inflammatory markers that many people are walking around with
that are high and that are really directly causing toxicity to the
[blood]vessels, [thereby] leading to coronary artery disease, stroke,
Alzheimer's and a whole host of things. Almost every chronic disease starts in
the vessels — more specifically the capillaries.
High sensitivity C-reactive protein is another
inflammatory marker that when elevated is really indicative of pathogens in the
mouth, among other things. That is one thing that is totally missed by
traditional doctors [but] is a key component. The oral testing we do includes
Interleukin-6 that tracks closely with C-reactive protein.
If you've had root canals or wisdom teeth taken out,
or have bleeding gums, [we can] test to see the vast array of pathogens that we
know are associated with pretty much every disease syndrome out there.
So, we take these things that have been invisible to
the masses and bring it at an affordable cost structure. We have a very robust
panel of 55 biomarkers that runs about $150, including vitamin D … If you were
to take that same panel, it would be $400 to $500 if you were to go directly to
LabCorp.
However, we highly recommend you get this testing from
us with a one-hour consult included because of our unique way of explaining the
“story” behind your biomarkers — and what you can do to take control of your
health. Even with the consult, our pricing is less compared to the labs alone
from most places.”
In addition to helping you evaluate your
chronic disease risk, this panel will also help you assess your COVID-19 risk.
They also offer an advanced panel that is even more comprehensive. It costs
about $400 and includes a one-hour consultation to help you understand what all
the markers mean.
As noted by Lewis, “It's all about where
do you lie on the health/disease continuum. We very accurately are placing
people on that, and there's not a marker we test for that's not modifiable
through lifestyle or other appropriate interventions. We're not treating
symptoms. We're going right at the disease.”
Where to Get the Panel
If you’re interested in ordering this
panel, go to HealthRevivalPartners.com. If you want to get the comprehensive COVID / JAB risk screening panel,
go to www.healthrevivalpartners.com/post-jab-tests. You will be asked to fill out a questionnaire, after
which you receive a requisition to have your blood drawn at a LabCorp.
The report you get will be a comprehensive
and detailed report from Health Revival Partners in addition to the standard
lab report. Carter explains:
“It really starts with the initial questionnaire and
we give you a grade from A to F. We wanted to make it so that the average
person could really see what is going on in a very tangible fashion. Obviously,
you answer 125 questions that are much more probing than your traditional questionnaire.
If you end up with a grade of C, D or F, then that
tells you your report card of health is not so good. Then we give guidelines on
those questions. When you do your biomarker test, we give you a temperature.
It's called your chronic disease temperature and of course 98.6 is a normal
temperature.
When we do the biomarkers, we look at optimal ranges,
not just normal ranges. We want everyone to be optimal, not just normal. When
those values are either too high or too low out of the optimal range, then you
get a corresponding increase in your temperature.
Our “normal” ranges are best on early mortality data
for each biomarker. Our normal levels are much tighter compared to the standard
of care. We are looking for chronic (smoldering) whereas they are only looking
to see if you are very sick or acutely sick.
So now you can have a temperature of, say, 103 based
on high homocysteine, high C-reactive protein, high fibrinogen, high white
blood cell count and various other biomarkers. We're testing 55 biomarkers, but
21 of them really home in on and create that temperature setting ... Even more
biomarkers are part of the COVID panel.
When you correlate that to COVID, we have a little
analogy of what's in your glass. If your glass is a quarter-full, half-full,
three-quarters full, you could be walking around with all of these different
things: toxins, pesticides, subacute infections.
When your glass gets full and overflowing, then
generally that's going to express as disease. We show where people are on that
continuum. How full is your glass of these different things? With the biomarker
panel, that gives us a great window [into your COVID risk].”
Building a Stronger Foundation for
Functional Medicine
Again, to learn more, and to join the
Health Revival Partners’ chronic disease support program, go to HealthRevivalPartners.com. In closing, Lewis notes:
“Integrative and functional medicine is like herding
cats. They got into that because they're outliers, but I've been trying to get
some of the highest-level leadership in functional medicine to create a core
standard of labs that every doctor takes because the biggest reason why you're
not getting served well in medicine today is because the dark side is saying we
don't have the evidence.
One of Carter’s and my life's goals is to herd the
functional integrative cats together to build standards, and I think we've done
a very good job of creating a very important end-point standard that I think
anybody could hang their hat on. That's early mortality. So, we really want to
do that.
“The other part of it is we wrote a peer-reviewed paper1 last year, and we coined the term the
‘pre-cytokine storm.’ Carter talked about your glass being a quarter-full,
half-full or overflowing. Measuring your pre-cytokine storm — which our panel
incorporates, and then our COVID panel expands even more, so either of those
panels are available to anybody that comes to our site — will tell you what
your risk factors are.
Your blood doesn't lie. So, what I'm hoping people
will do is become part of the solution. Take the COVID and the vaccine survey,
get your COVID risks labs drawn, and then we'll be able to report back to you
and publish peer-reviewed articles about this correlation that right now we're
all being marginalized on because we're not creating enough evidence.
Judy [Mikovits] knows exactly what's going on, but to
convince the world, we've got to get more conventional and functional lab data
in large sets to prove our point. That's how we're going to start winning, with
evidence-based functional medicine.”
Sources and References
·
1 Emerg Infect Dis Diag J. Vol 2 Issue
3. May 8, 2020
