Mysterious Symptoms

Hi everyone,

I'm 24 years old and would describe myself as active, physically fit, and healthy. However, over the past 8 months or so--I have been feeling really crummy and have had some odd symptoms and health issues pop up. I have been to numerous doctors and can't seem to find out what's up. If ANYONE has any ideas, please let me know. Here's the timeline and background:

May through Oct 2016: Worked with lawn pesticides daily during a summer job
Nov 2016: shot deer, field dressed, badly cut hand, lots of deer blood inside cut for hours until I was able to clean my hand
Dec 2016: began to notice sudden intolerance to alcohol (1 or 2 light beers would make me feel very intoxicated)
Jan 2017: forgetfulness, inability to focus, brain fog, making frequent mistakes at work, dizziness, lack of interest in things I usually enjoy, etc. beginning to set in
Feb 2017: visited primary care physician, ran metabolic panel, cbc, etc. , blood work perfect
Mar 2017: suspected Lyme Disease, visited Lyme doc, treated w/ doxycyline for 2 months, tests came back negative via Igenex Labs
May 2017: suspected Candida Overgrowth, tests came back very negative
June 2017: Blood in urine one day, ran blood test and urine test, urine showed high levels of microscopic blood, kidney function appeared normal, doc said it was a fluke thing
June 2017: went to doctor for Pilonidal Cyst that developed, MRI confirmed, specialist recommended not removing it as it was not infected and was small, began to treat, has since went away thanks to coconut oil topical application
July 2017- big boil appeared on left foot, very painful, lots of pressure, went to urgent care, lanced and drained, tested positive for Staph infection, took Cephalexin for 10 days to clear infection

Keep in mind, I am not very stressed, I live a pretty good life, take a high quality multiple vitamin, fish oil, vitamin d (5,000iu) and vitamin b daily. One other thing I have going on is a weird bout of mosaic plantar warts on my feet. Does anyone have any idea what the heck is going on with me? Thank you so much in advance!

Hey PeteZa,

Thanks for the information. I strongly suspected Lyme from the blood to blood contact I had with the deer, but tested twice (CDC and Igenex) negative and have since completely moved on from the idea of Lyme. The only band I had + for was 41 band, which I believe indicates the previous presence of a spirochete of some sort...

Did you have any with IND - those are indeterminate and in my opinion are closer to a positive than a negative.

Test results have to be read in conjunction with your presentation of symptoms and your history.

On the bottom of the Igenex test it states: Diagnosis should not be based on laboratory tests alone. Results should be interpreted in conjunction with clinical symptoms and patient history.

Take those tests I put in my post and see how you come out.

Georgia Hunter said...
The alcohol intolerance is a sign of liver disease and its cause is speculative.

So everyone with lyme and experience alcohol intolerance has liver disease? uhmm...not sure if correlation is absolute causation here.

Georgia Hunter said...
Although your symptoms don't match the diseases, Brucellosis is the most commonly transmitted vector from wildlife to hunters. Leptospirosis and anaplasmosis can also be acquired from blood to blood transmission in hunters. There are also various viruses that can be transmitted from animals to man in prolonged blood to blood contact. Bartonella has a flagella and can be acquired through blood to blood contact. Borrelia is the same. Flagellate containing Trypanosomes have been found in other ruminants but not much study has been done on these. When studying Lipoptena species, Bartonella always seems to come up. Tularemia could be a possibility as well.

I would be looking very hard into the pesticides that you dealt with. The alcohol intolerance is a sign of liver disease and its cause is speculative. It could be either pesticides or a vector borne disease.

I have alcohol intolerance but not liver disease.

Thanks for the replies! No IND results from my Igenex test. Only + was 41 band.

Anyone think I could simply be experiencing gluten sensitivity? Non-celiac gluten sensitivity? I don't really have digestive issues at all. All neuro (and then the random staph infection and urine in blood). I also have plantar warts on my feet I've been trying to deal with and a small bout of athlete's foot. What a mess..LOL

Girlie said...

I have alcohol intolerance but not liver disease.

I'm sorry to hear you have alcohol intolerance Girlie. What happens in our body in a situation like yours or the OP is a very complex situation. I don't expect many people to understand it. I'll try to shed some light on what is happening. Review of the scientific literature and knowledge of our biochemical pathways leads to a determination of liver disease in a case like yours. It is liver disease, not necessarily liver damage. The amount of liver damage is determined by multiple factors and could occur over a long period of time. We would hope it wouldn't happen at all. For alcoholics, it is easy to see where their problems originate. For others with chronic yeast and bacterial issues, it is more subtle.

Candida, yeasts, and even Saccharomyces for that matter, convert carbohydrates into ethanol. This is often described as the fermenting of sugars and it is their method of producing energy. In our body, we reduce that ethanol production down into acetaldehyde using the main enzyme of alcohol dehydrogenase. I'll post a few links at the bottom if you want to read more in depth because there are several steps involved. The final step produces water and carbon dioxide.

A quote from the literature: "The resulting acetate is unstable and spontaneously breaks down to water and CO2. When these oxidative mechanisms become overwhelmed, acetaldehyde accumulates and exerts its toxic effects." Toxic effects cause disease. When you are alcohol sensitive, your pathways are overwhelmed. It could be an alcohol dehydrogenase issue, a catalyse issue, an aldehyde dehydrogenase, issue, a protein deamination issue, but whatever the case, it is an issue and that issue is a form of liver disease. One could argue that is is a metabolic syndrome but I don't believe it to be the case. These reactions occur in the cytoplasm, the mitochondria, and the peroxisomes so there are intracellular transport molecules involved. It could simply be a deficiency of transport molecules, I've found literature to support that in the past.

When you research liver disease, almost every article refers to alcoholism. That is the reasonable source of ethanol but NAFLD is rapidly overtaking alcohol related liver disease in numbers. Not many people want a liver biopsy which is the only current method to accurately distinguish between the stages of each disease.

I can type a lot about this but if you feel that we, I'm right there with you, don't have liver disease, you are incorrect. Alanine aminotransferase or total bilirubin levels are often used to access liver function. Using these as indicative markers to determine NASH from steatosis is often difficult. You may read otherwise, but this has been shown in the literature. I don't know many physicians that look for elevated lysophosphatidylethanolamines as indicative for steatosis, which is a step farther in disease progression than what I feel we are.

You can find direct links to microbiome induced ethanol toxicity in the literature and the last article shows a 5 fold increase in Escherichia levels and elevated ethanol levels in obese patients with NASH. I know I'm not fat but still feel I have this issue. Ya'll just need to believe me on this one. A GI Proteobacteria, Enterobacteriaceae, or Escherichia concentration of greater than 1% along with elevated yeasts can lead to what we've been talking about. I'm not trying to out anyone as having this or that, it is what it is. It is something I've been looking at for quite some time.

/www.hindawi.com/journals/omcl/2010/406524/abs/
aem.asm.org/content/74/8/2259.short
www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168827808008052
www.jlr.org/content/56/3/722.short
/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23406661
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hep.26093/fullwww.nature.com/nrgastro/journal/v9/n12/full/nrgastro.2012.209.html?http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hep.26093/full[/foxtrotcallback=true

Post Edited (Georgia Hunter) : 8/25/2017 2:55:33 AM (GMT-6)

Georgia Hunter said...

Girlie said...

I have alcohol intolerance but not liver disease.

I'm sorry to hear you have alcohol intolerance Girlie. What happens in our body in a situation like yours or the OP is a very complex situation. I don't expect many people to understand it. I'll try to shed some light on what is happening. Review of the scientific literature and knowledge of our biochemical pathways leads to a determination of liver disease in a case like yours. It is liver disease, not necessarily liver damage.

Sorry for my possible ignorance. But how can this be determined without examining Girlie? Without blood work. Without a biopsy, Without determining if she has common factors like a fatty liver, cirrhosis, checking if she has hepatitis A,B or C. She may not have any of these things (only she would know).

And then simply concluding this because of negative reaction to alcohol.

Why not the more common reason of lyme creates sensitivities and allergies. The liver already working hard (and properly) of detoxing the extra toxins lyme causes thus it adds to inflammation.

Unless "liver disease" can simply also mean the "liver is working properly and hard but is overloaded", then I can see what you are saying. If we want to label that liver disease then I guess we can give it that label. I wonder if a vast majority of chronic lyme patients also know they have liver disease too.

So, I have liver disease even though I have good blood work...no jaundice...etc. no fatigue...

Based solely on the fact that I don't tolerate alcohol? BTW this is only since I've had lyme.

What would be the test to show this? A biopsy?

Sorry, but I'm not buying in. If I had liver disease...I believe that my liver function tests would show something.

Girlie said...
So, I have liver disease even though I have good blood work...no jaundice...etc. no fatigue...

Based solely on the fact that I don't tolerate alcohol? BTW this is only since I've had lyme.

What would be the test to show this? A biopsy?

Sorry, but I'm not buying in. If I had liver disease...I believe that my liver function tests would show something.

LFT's will not show the types of lipid issues I am referring to. Those are transaminase tests. When making a histological diagnosis from a liver biopsy, the patients are often placed into the following categories: normal, steatosis, steatohepatitis, or cirrhosis. But there is another category that comprises up to almost 5% of patients and those patients don't fall into any of these categories. These patients have lipid metabolism issues (i.e liver disease) but can't be included into the steatosis group. That is the group I feel we fall into. Alcohol induced liver cirrhosis is on one end of the spectrum, we are on the other end. I added a few quotes from the literature as to why I feel we are in that 5% and it has to do with the bactericidal effects of fatty acids. Our body is releasing more fatty acids to help reduce our pathogen load. It's a deep concept focusing on the concept that an altered lipid metabolism is more beneficial than increased bacteria in the periphery. The literature supports the concept.

All copy and paste quotes from the literature:

A definitive diagnosis can only be achieved by liver biopsy and histopathological analysis[6]. Efforts are being made to find non-invasive markers of disease, which can distinguish the stages of fibrosis, fibrosis from NASH and NASH from simple steatosis[7, 6]. However, there are no widely accepted methods at this time other than liver biopsy.

Blood tests
LFTs: mildly raised ALT is often the first change relative to AST but this tends to reverse if disease progresses, and then ALT falls. Up to 50% of patients can have normal ALT and AST levels. Further LFT changes if alcohol is the cause (raised gamma-glutamyl transpeptidase (GGT)). Other blood tests are part of the work-up for associated causes: Fasting lipids (usually raised).

As steatosis is so common it will not be unusual for GPs to be faced with presenting features suggestive of this diagnosis and hence the need for succinct assessment and management.[14]

The electrophilic nature of acetaldehyde[12] enables it to bind and form adducts, i.e. covalent chemical addition products, with proteins, lipids, and DNA.[3,11,16-18] Adducts are broadly pathogenic because they impair functions of proteins and lipids, and promote DNA damage and mutation.[11]

This suggests that genetic polymorphisms in ADH that result in increased generation of acetaldehyde also enhance ethanol’s pro-carcinogenic effects.

In this regard, other disease states such as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) or chronic hepatitis C virus infection, and ischemia/hypoperfusion caused by heart failure or atherosclerosis result in increased accumulation of lipid peroxidation products and adduct formation.[113,114]

These observations indicate that bactericidal effects of polyunsaturated fatty acids are mediated by a peroxidative process involving H202 and bacterial iron.

Fatty acids can inhibit the growth of fungi , protozoans [6], viruses [7], and numerous types of bacteria .

Further, while the role of lipids in fibrosis is often discussed in the context of repair( 10 ), their ability to regulate oxidative stress and key transcription factors appears more influential and may have significant effects on the progression of NAFLD ( 11, 12 ).

This finding further reinforces the difficulty of using traditional liver function indicators to distinguish NASH from steatosis, as others have demonstrated as well.

Disease is defined as simply a disorder of structure or function. You are thinking of the signs and symptoms of liver failure or cirrhosis which is not what I am referring to. I feel I have what we are talking about and I look normal, tests look normal, and there are no signs and symptoms a physician would say I have a liver issue. But when I examine what is happening physiologically in my body that cause my current situation, the indicators point to an alteration in liver function to benefit my immune response. An alteration in liver function is liver disease. I don't know if I am alcohol intolerant because I haven't had any alcohol in years. If I do have an intolerance, I would suspect it stared with a translocation of bacteria from the GI tract to the periphery and finishes with an epigenetic shift in ADH. That seems the most plausible explanation.

dacarte3 said...

I appreciate the nuance reply. I also agree MSIDS is probably the most accurate way to describe chronic lyme patients.
"a disorder of structure or function" is a disease. I can understand this broad definition. But we still don't know if Girlie truly has a "disorder of structure or function" of the liver.
I get the whole you have to go with the odds and probability concept. But I still don't agree you can fully assess the odds and probability of something as complicated as the human body without first examining the patient thoroughly. The human body is not an air conditioner.
Moral of the story is you can't just tell people so matter of fact that they have liver disease, or kidney disease, or lung cancer, or etc. You can't diagnose people like this on internet forums. The human body is too complicated.
Many of us are even hesitant tell someone they have lyme if the person didn't give us enough lyme specific data.

Perhaps your definition and my definition of liver disease are different. I am OK with that. But my definition is not a broad definition, it is the definition. I even went into great detail explaining the details of the condition.

What is alcohol intolerance? It is an alteration of normal function and it is manifested because of a particular set of conditions.

If someone tests you and finds elevated blood glucose levels, that indicates an alteration in function that is or will lead to a diagnosis of diabetes depending on how often it occurs. Blood pressure testing is the same. If your liver isn't functioning the way it should by not metabolizing alcohol, then it is an alteration in function. It may not be something your physician may test for, but it is an alteration in function and by definition, that is disease. If she would have told me her blood pressure was high, I would have said she had hypertension. It is what it is.

I have attempted to explain the physiology behind my reasoning. I am alright with a differing opinion because I base my opinions on facts and would rather leave the semantics alone. We are all not well because we have an alteration of body function. In most cases, it is too vast or diverse to quantify. But there are specific dysfunctions that occur that can be defined and alleviated if you know the physiology of the body. I've spent a lot of time, effort, and money in knowing how the body works so that I can correct the problems that I have.

You need to understand that LFT's are transaminase tests. I even showed scientific literature that stated what I am referring to will not show up in a LFT. If you admit that you have alcohol intolerance but refuse to say your liver is not functioning properly, there isn't much more I can say. Not being Asian and having the sudden onset of accumulation of acetylaldehyde upon ethanol consumption is not considered normal function. I admit my biological/physiological limitations and should not expect that of others. I apologize for this and if my phrasing seemed inappropriate.