Dr. George Papanicolaou
speaker
129 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Jun 2025
Dr. George Papanicolaou’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And when we look at those, we can see, are those organic acids in the right balance? And if they're not, that's an indicator functionally that particular systems and pathways aren't working correctly. And then we combine that with the nutrient assessment. We combine that with the mitochondrial function, and we get a picture.
And so in Claire's picture, we found that she had an omega index, omega-3 index. It was very low. So that means the all-important essential fatty acids, the omega-3s, EPA and DHA, they're very important. for neuronal function. They're very important for getting neurons to fire correctly. She was very low in omega-3s.
And she was very low. And there are studies, particularly with ADHD patients and omega-3s, and doses of upward of four grams per day suggest that in a large number of people with ADHD, they actually start just increasing their omegas. They start to see a benefit. And you see a reduction in their distractibility and improvement in focus. And also self-regulation of mood.
So omega is very important. On top of that, she had a very low vitamin D. She was deficient. And vitamin D is very important. It's a pro-hormone. It plays a very important role in mood regulation. And also it's a potent anti-inflammatory itself. We needed to increase their vitamin D. She was low on magnesium.
Magnesium plays a role in about 300 different very important chemical reactions in the body, particularly in the brain. It's very important for methylation, which is a basic chemical process. that can turn on neurotransmitters or off neurotransmitters and be involved in their metabolism. And if you're low on magnesium, it's going to impact how dopamine is managed. And dopamine is critical in ADHD.
It is the molecule in your frontal lobe that's responsible for learning, cognition, executive function and planning, and mood regulation. So it's very important that magnesium be at an appropriate level. So we needed to correct that as well. And on that particular organic acids test, we look at metabolites of dopamine and norepinephrine. First, we're out of balance.
So now we had a lot of information. We had low magnesium. We have low omegas. And we have now this out of balance dopamine system. So now I'm really beginning to understand a lot here, what we need to do. We need to replace, we need to fix the gut. We need to give her the nutrients like the omegas, the vitamin D, the magnesium.
Now this dopamine balance becomes really very important because it's out of balance. And here is one of the things we do. You're definitely not going to be getting at your local doctor anytime soon. And that's the genetic testing that we do.
And again, Mark, as we've talked about this before, and you've said and written about and used this term, the issue with the brain isn't necessarily the brain, it's the body. And that's what we put into the body that trigger all of these systems or deprive these systems of what they need to function correctly. So that's what we're doing here. We're fixing the body.
We're helping it function the way it was designed to function.
Yeah, so this is one of my favorite things to do. I order it on all my patients, but I can't wait to get the results back when I see my ADHD patient because oftentimes the genetics line up almost... hand-in-glove with what they're experiencing in their day-to-day life in terms of concentration, focus, mood dysregulation, their inability to read social cues.
What we do is we look at these, what we call single nucleotide polymorphisms, or these, I call them gene blueprints. You have gene blueprints. Your genes are just blueprints for making proteins, most of which are enzymes. Some of them are structural proteins, but That's what these are. They're blueprints.
And when God made you, he opened up the file for enzyme X. And when he opens it, there's six different blueprints. We don't know which one he gives you until we look. So we found out, you know, it depends on what mood he was in that day. He may have gotten a really fast enzyme X, a really slow enzyme X. We don't know until we do this test.
So now I can find out there's enzymes that break down dopamine. In various parts of the brain, there's enzymes that are responsible for serotonin metabolism. So we look at those. And there can be patterns that can be associated or predispose somebody to a certain way of thinking or behaving or experiencing the world. In Claire's case, one of the blueprints I look at is called the COMT.
So that COMT blueprint is basically responsible for breaking down dopamine in the prefrontal cortex. Dopamine is critical because it is the neurotransmitter responsible, as I said before, for cognition, learning, focus, attention, planning, which you call executive function, and self-regulation of emotion.
It plays a big role, although there are other parts of the brain, newer transmitters that do that as well. In her case, her gene breaks down dopamine very slowly. So she's predisposed to having a high level of dopamine in her brain at baseline, which is actually a good thing. And then she has another gene, the MAO gene. It also breaks down dopamine. And that one was also working very slow.
The role of those when those are really high, actually at baseline, your superpower will be the ability to focus and hyper-focus. The problem is that those two are also involved in the stress response. And people with a CMT, what we call met-met or slow-active, slow-performer, They tend to be anxious. They tend more towards depression. And they tend towards having ADHD.
Homozygous PT is slow. So she's met-met. Met-met is slow. That's met-met is, yeah, met-met and AA are the same. And that's slow. And she's going to build up her dopamine. So I found that she had the slow form of the CMT gene. Dopamine, we think, is great to be at higher levels in the prefrontal cortex. And it is. But it's also part of the fight or flight process.
reflex and dopamine in particular patients like claire her dopamine receptors also were impacted and so the dopamine when she's in her if everything's good she can concentrate but very little things would set her off she if if you know she'd have a phone call Somebody's going to be late, or she overdrew her bank account, or she failed a test. That would disrupt her very quickly.
She'd go into fight or flight because her dopamine levels and her norepinephrine levels are already high. They're very close to spilling over. So it doesn't take much to throw her into an anxiety state, in a state where she can't focus and concentrate. So we're able to balance that out. And there are ways of doing that.
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