General chemical sensitivity due to brain damage, imbalance with no apparent explanation

Surprisingly, there are people who suffer from inflammation or allergic symptoms in the face of perfumes, all kinds of scents, soaps, detergents, a gust of cold air, or even a stressful situation. Why such an aggressive reaction to elements that are harmless to most of us?

The problem is called general chemical sensitivity and causes great skepticism even among medical professionals. For this reason, many patients end up being diagnosed with a “psychosomatic problem,” a mixed bag of sorts.

However, this heterogeneous group of seemingly incomprehensible symptoms may have a very specific common origin: an immune imbalance resulting from brain damage.

Mind under control

If we accept a psychosomatic origin, we must identify a problem in the central nervous system that causes a symptom common to all of them: a massive release of histamine that affects the entire body.

Histamine is an inflammatory agent that causes allergies. It is produced by various cells, including basophils, mast cells, and mast cells. This effect can range from mild inflammation associated with spring allergies to acute and aggressive inflammation associated with food allergies.

Patients with general chemical sensitivity show very high levels of histamine as well as inflammatory factors indicating a clear imbalance in the control of the inflammatory response.

How else, the control of this reaction lies in the brain, in the command center of the body. Specifically, it is the hypothalamus and the pituitary or pituitary gland that secrete the hormones that control metabolism, growth, reproduction, and the immune system.

Brain damage that upsets the balance of the immune system

When we think of brain damage, the first thing that usually comes to mind is a disorder that affects motor coordination or cognitive ability. But it’s not. The reality is that head injuries can also cause respiratory problems, cardiovascular problems, kidney failure, and even deep vein thrombosis.

In addition, it has been shown that if the damage affects the hypothalamus and pituitary gland, it can also lead to an imbalance in the immune system. And it turns out that numerous reviews of the scientific and clinical literature show that people with generalized chemical sensitivity experience hyperstimulation of the hypothalamic and pituitary gland-regulated system when they are exposed to substances that cause odor sensitivity. Everything starts to make sense, right?

An imbalance in the production of hormones by the pituitary and hypothalamus can lead to serious problems. For example, if vasopressin in the hypothalamus kicks in and eventually leads to overstimulation of the mast cells and causes more histamine release. If circulating corticotropin releasing factor increases, mast cells are also activated.

However, this type of reaction can occur without traumatic injury. In fact, patients with recurrent migraines have been found to be highly likely to develop general chemical sensitivity characterized by light phobia, overreaction to smells, and generalized central sensitivity. In addition, some types of migraine are associated with damage to the pituitary gland.

Even worse, some head injuries appear to cause an imbalance in the pituitary gland, which triggers autoimmune processes even months or weeks after the traumatic event.

There is enough evidence to suspect that behind the general chemical sensitivity, this kind of disproportionate allergy, there may be brain damage in the hypothalamus and pituitary gland that will cause a hormonal imbalance.

Mast cells as histamine releasing agents

Another detail to take into account is that brain injuries disrupt the blood-brain barrier, causing an inflammatory effect in the brain, in which mast cell activation also plays an important role. These cells are also resident cells of the central nervous system and the meninges, the connective tissue that protects the brain and separates it from the bones.

For all these reasons, it is possible that the continuous activation of these mast cells, resulting from chronic inflammation at the brain level and associated with acute events caused by exposure to external agents, is responsible for the high levels of histamine found in patients with general diseases. chemical sensitivity, as well as its crises.

We need treatments based on the origin of the problem

Probably the biggest problem in overcoming such a complex imbalance is the apparent lack of a clear common factor, a factor that links damage to the central nervous system with an excessive release of histamine in the face of harmless external stimuli. Therefore, finding the cause and correcting the imbalance caused by brain damage is the key to solving these problems.

At the same time, it is necessary to abandon skepticism, focus on destabilizing agents and seek the most effective treatments that reverse symptoms, especially by reducing the inflammatory response associated with this disease.

Guillermo López Lluch, Professor of Cell Biology. Junior Research Fellow at the Andalusian Center for Developmental Biology. Researcher in the field of metabolism, aging, immune and antioxidant systems, Pablo de Olavide University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.