Allergy and the Brain

Some old knowledge is valuable, but is forgotten. Walter Alvarez, a well-known physician of the Mayo clinic and popular medical writer for several decades, provided a personal perspective on food-mind interactions, many years ago, in his introduction to the text, "Allergy of the Nervous System": 

"For years I knew I was highly sensitive to chicken, I suffered from what I called "dumb Monday," when I was too dull to do much constructive work like writing. Finally, I discovered that bad Mondays were due to the Alvarez family's habit of having chicken for Sunday dinner... My most remarkable personal experience with brain dulling due to food allergy came many years ago when... I ate a whole broiled chicken. Next day I had severe diarrhea and with this I became so dulled I could not read with comfort. And that night I had a hallucination of sight, such as I had never had before and haven't had since."

Alvarez and other astute physicians knew about food allergy and its mental effects for many years. ,  ,    Food allergy was implicated in depression, anxiety, hyperactivity in children, epilepsy, migraine, Meniere's syndrome, Multiple Sclerosis, and Guillain-Barre Syndrome. Unfortunately, this clinical wisdom, shared by prominent physicians for many years, has been lost to subsequent generations of physicians and needs to be renewed.

Important disturbances of brain function occur during immune activity in the body with the strongest influences on the autonomic nervous system and mood-emotion circuits. Changes in arousal, mood, sleep-waking patterns, appetite, thirst and temperature regulation are regularly reported by patients who have immune mediated disease. The defense against infection features fever, loss of appetite, general malaise and the tendency to sleep.

In patients with delayed patterns of milk and wheat allergy will report fatigue, progressing to sleepiness after eating the offending food. They may also experience increased thirst, frequent urination, hot and cold sensations, and headaches. Immune activity produces mental-emotional symptoms. Anaphylaxis victims are said to have "panic attacks", if they end up in the psychiatry department.

Children with delayed pattern food allergy may have nightmares, tantrums, and fail to learn at school because of attention deficits. Some of these children grow into troubled adults with "learning disability". Others remain hyper, moody, and volatile. Delayed pattern food allergy patients are sometimes described as "depressed" or "neurotic". Migraine sufferers may have neurological symptoms that suggest a stroke or a seizure. The occasional patient will have food-triggered epilepsy.    Often changes in sensation, motor control, balance, and vision are symptoms of food allergy and suggest the diagnosis of serious neurological diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis.

The information and control properties of the immune system are analogues of brain function, with the six major functions of sentience: sensing, deciding, acting, remembering, feeling and knowing. Important connections between brain-mind-immunity work at a general ambient level of feeling-environment-attitude. During immune activity in the body, important disturbances of brain function occur. The strongest influences are on autonomic and mood-emotion circuits. My delayed pattern food allergy model postulates that foods immunize us against a very large number of antigens. This continuously changing immunity produces, by a variety of mechanisms, dysfunction and disease, including brain dysfunction. Brain dysfunction is expressed as disordered thinking, feeling, behaving, and remembering. The food allergy illness patterns in children and adults involve typical clusters of digestive, respiratory, skin, and behavioral disturbances. The illness patterns occasionally involve inhalant allergies, defined in the usual way by skin and blood tests but can operate independently through other, more complex immune mechanisms.

There is significant overlap of immune regulation with the chemical senses (taste and smell) and appetite control in the brain. Odors and strong emotions are likely to influence immune activity; many patients with food allergy report smell hypersensitivity and strong aversions. Many have been classically conditioned to react to taste and odor stimuli with allergic symptoms and/or emotional responses, including anxiety or panic attacks. Few food-provoked symptoms are "psychological" as many physicians have claimed. Adverse reactions to foods or "food allergy" have a physiological basis, and can be explained by proper insightful medical biology. Dr. Aas, a Norwegian allergist and researcher, remarked at the Marabou symposium on "Food Sensitivity" :  "In my institute I am the only experimental monkey that we have and from several passive transfer experiments on myself, with occasional rather severe reactions, I am the first to admit that allergic reactions are accompanied with intellectual and emotional disturbances. If you have not experienced that, I ask you to be a volunteer in my laboratory."

Dr. Joseph Egger, who published excellent studies showing the effect of foods in children who developed migraine headaches, epilepsy, and hyperactivity, stated:   "Taken together, the available research suggests that particular types of adverse food reactions sometimes correlate with neurological and psychiatric symptoms. The diversity of foods involved...is suggestive of allergy, and the adverse effects may correlate with immunological abnormalities."

Both immune and nervous systems interact when things go wrong at the level of molecules and cells. The molecular-cellular mechanisms are monitored (but not controlled!) at the level of consciousness. The experience of symptoms is the monitor image in consciousness of problems at the molecular-cellular level. We can speak of noise as the disorder and chaos that confuses or interferes with a successful relationship with our environment. Molecular noise is the disorder created by substances flowing through our body-brain. At certain levels, information noise is equivalent to molecular noise. At the level of equivalence we cannot tell the difference between a molecular problem and a personal problem. As the noise increases, the system becomes more unstable or hypersensitive. We feel this instability as emotional disturbance and physical symptoms.

Buller et al reported that:  the hypothalamic nuclei, particularly the paraventricular nuclei (PVN), are sites of central nervous system responses during immune challenges. The brainstem catecholamine cells of the nucleus tractus solitarius  and ventrolateral medulla  relay systemic immune signals to the PVN.   Steinman et al   suggested that: “We are now learning that the interconnections between molecules that modulate brain function and those that mediate the immune response are more intertwined than we had previously imagined…Leptin, a molecule that is critical in the regulation of energy balance and body weight, is a strong regulator of Th1 autoimmunity .. one of many examples of redundancy and overlapping roles of molecules within neuroendocrine systems and the immune system. Corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF), a master regulator of hypothalamic and pituitary function, can downregulate Th1 autoimmunity… Basic behaviors such as fasting have potent influences on the induction of Th1 autoimmunity. A short fast can circumvent an attack of autoimmune paralysis. Thus, while "feeding a cold" may have salutary effects in combating a viral infection, starving an autoimmune disease may protect against immune damage… While "simple" acts such as fasting influence immunity, complicated states like pregnancy modulate autoimmune diseases as strongly as any known drug. Gender itself has an impact on autoimmunity. Femalesare more susceptible than males to diseases lsuch as systemic lupus erythematous, rheumatoid arthritis, autoimmune thyroiditis, and MS”

Strous et al reviewed the brain effects of immune activity in patients with systemic lupus. Neuropsychiatric manifestations are present in approximately 70% of patients with systemic lupus erythematosis (SLE); 20 different manifestations of behavioral disorders have been described, associated with a number of autoantibodies. Autoantibodies have been identified that target brain-specific antigens such as the neuronal, N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor. Psychosis has been associated with 8 autoantibodies. Immune activity may occur inside the brain or in blood vessels, causing ischemic and/or hemorrhagic events; thrombotic capillary occlusion may occur with associated inflammation. Cerebrovascular endothelial injury may increase blood-brain-barrier (BBB) permeability with increased access of pathogenic autoantibodies and immune cells into the brain.

The anti-ribosomal P antibody is specific to SLE with a prevalence of 6-36%. High anti-ribosomal P titers in SLE have been observed in patients with psychosis and depression. An autoantibody commonly found in SLE specifically binds the olfactory cortex, which is associated with depression, corroborates the role of the limbic-olfactory pathway in depression. Complex connections exist between the immune and nervous systems. Olfactory dysfunction is often prominent at early stages in various neurological conditions (e.g. multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia). Involvement of the amygdala mediated via anti-NMDA autoantibodies would alter emotional behavior. 

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The Human Brain in Health and Disease, 2010, is a Persona Digital Book. We encourage readers to quote and paraphrase topics from Human Brain in Health and Disease published online and expect proper citations to accompany all derivative writings. The author is Stephen Gislason and the publisher is Persona Digital Publications. The date of publication is 2010. The URL to the book description is Human Brain