Somebody posted here about how they use doxycycline with DMSA to enhance the chelation. I checked google scholar and sure enough, unless I read it wrong, found a couple papers that showed (particularly iron) doxycycline being used. Now I can’t find them and will be busy for awhile today, will work on it again later.
I have used doxycycline with a couple of my weekly oral DMSA doses, but have not tested anything myself. I’m not too serious about regularly using an antibiotic. It will be a couple months before I do another ferritin.
It caught my eye more because my daughter is using it with IV vitamin C a couple times a week to fight cancer and she is anemic.
One question would be, if your ferritin is already low, would the DMSA have a harmful effect, or would it reduce the lead (and other metals?) without further reducing the ferritin?
Logic doesn’t always work with this medical stuff, but I would think a chelator would tie up the first thing it sees. So if I have a ferritin of 300 then it will get way more of that than if I have a ferritin of 50. Unfortunately same for the lead. It works way better if you have a huge problem than if you’re trying to lower a number that’s not so bad. I may be doing more harm than good at this point.
AIUI a low ferritiin is a sign of lower inflammation. Not so much crazy low though.
My recent ferritins have been: 57, 64, 52, 60, 24, 48, 72, 58 (same units)
My irons have been 20.1, 24.5, 20.6, 17.3, 28.1, 26.9, 20.5 (same units)
The low ferritin was with a different lab that did a same day test which might mean it is more accurate for ferritin I don’t know.
I do lots of odd things to my metabolism, but am not doing anything deliberately to affect iron metabolism. What I would say is that my weekly measurements have a broader range than your measurements.
One thing I like about weekly measurements is it is possible to see to some extent what variation is meaningless.
However, the main labs I am using at the moment are postal or not otherwise same day (one is same day, but it takes me a lot of time to drive there and back so I am not generally inclined to use it).
I am pleased with my ferritin results in the round as I started a couple of years ago with: 420, 337, 358, 328, 332
Hence clearly there has been a big drop in Ferritin. Iron is if anything slightly up.
Ok, found something that says tetracyclines are chelators:
Tetracyclines are established chelators[3], [4], [5], with a high affinity for copper, iron and zinc, and lower affinities for magnesium and calcium [3,4,6]. Tetracyclines bind to the 30S bacterial ribosome through a magnesium bridge [7,8]. Abundant metals, such as iron, may interfere with this mechanism by binding to the magnesium binding site. The working hypothesis for the current study is that CP762 sequesters iron thereby minimising iron-binding to other ligands, e.g., tetracycline. This will promote complexation with lower affinity ions, such as magnesium, required for binding to the bacterial ribosome.
Does seem low. Not sure how bad/risky that is. Might have been coming down too, and is even lower than yours and I had begun researching it when I mentioned the point about the CR optimizers generally end up with low levels. I’ll try and discuss with doctors more.
One thing you might want to do out of an abundance of caution is the do some test to rule out colon cancer, eg the colon guard stool test if you don’t want to go full colonoscopy at your age.
Or since you are in the UK you can leverage that
The NHS uses a colon capsule endoscopy (CCE), also known as a pillcam colon or video capsule endoscopy (PillCam), as an alternative to a colonoscopy to examine the colon for abnormalities
(Think Bryan Johnson did/does something like that too)
“ Most people with anemia or iron overload don’t think about their immune system but iron levels are very closely linked to inflammation in your body. Learn the details on the regulation of iron stores in the body and the importance of macrophages in iron cycling. Find out how iron impacts insulin sensitivity and metabolic health and what happens when iron is deposited in your brain. liver and other organs.”
My doctor (Adam Bataineh) suggested it as a gentle way to increase my iron levels a bit more to 30 mg/L. If not enough, we’ll switch to a more potent supplement I guess.
Thanks. Is there a summary somewhere? I’m interested in “how iron impacts insulin sensitivity and metabolic health” and how to improve iron metabolism (rather than the levels per se) after skimming through these papers:
Iron imbalance in neurodegeneration 2024: “Another factor to consider is that even low ferritin levels might actually hide a high amount of redox-active iron, which triggers ferritin oxidation and its massive precipitation. Therefore, a low MRI ferritin-signal does not exclude the presence of significant neurotoxic iron. Currently, it is challenging to provide definitive therapeutic recommendations because the understanding of how iron interacts individually with mitochondria, dopamine, and synapses, as well as how these three systems interplay in situations of iron dyshomeostasis, remains incomplete.”
A brief history of brain iron accumulation in Parkinson disease and related disorders 2022: “Friedman and Galazka-Friedman have interpreted such findings as indicating that altered ferritin shell structure and the consequent leakage of free iron are more important for the pathophysiology of parkinsonism than total iron levels (Friedman and Galazka-Friedman 2012).”
