Multiple Sensitivity: Are Your Dendritic Cells on Overdrive?

Here is the third post in my series about multiple-sensitivity and new ways to look at it. You can see about neurons close to threshold here and brain-gating loss here. This time, we are looking at mechanisms for loss of oral tolerance in the immune system.

One of the things I see time and time again on gut screens is high or low SIgA. Secretory Immunoglobulin A is an immune marker and, simply put: if high, it suggests you are fighting something like an allergy, infection, inflammation etc, so you need to sort that out to get well. If low, your immune system is vulnerable to infections and allergy/sensitivity. You can read more about SIgA here on my SIgA Factsheet.

It’s the low SIgA we’re interested in here as a possible cause or factor in a person’s multiple-sensitivity.

SIgA tags food as safe..

SIgA’s job is to ‘tag’ stuff like food, bacteria and other proteins/fractions that present themselves to the gut – and other areas like the nose, lung, mouth, bladder, vagina etc – as ‘safe’ before they get to the dendritic cells. These dendritic cells ‘sample’ stuff to assess whether to trigger an inflammatory response to it or not. SIgA effectively binds to the proteins/potential antigens and prevents the dendritic cells from sampling it. If you don’t have enough SIgA for some reason, the dendritic cells start sampling willy-nilly. They have a tendency to over react and can get overwhelmed by a bombardment coming at them that should have been dealt with by the SIgA. It’s then easy to see how increasing multiple sensitivity ensues…

SIgA, stress and SCFAs…

So, the obvious first solution is to check and correct your SIgA levels, which you can do here either as part of a gut screen like the DD CSAP3 (my fave) or separately in saliva (if the issue is systemic/not food) or stool (if food sensitivity.) Stress is a biggie because stress is known to deplete SIgA. As stress goes up, so does cortisol and cortisol suppresses SIgA. The trick is to lower stress and support SIgA levels. You can see some ideas how to do that in the SIgA factsheet and the Raising SIgA protocol is in the Candida Plan. (Don’t forget to use the TGF version of that if you are grain and dairy free).

The dendritic cells need a slightly different approach – their activity is very dependent upon short chain fatty acids, especially butyrate – another marker I commonly see as low on the DD CSAP3 gut test. In this case, I’d be looking at things like Enterovite. The dosage varies depending on the case but 2-3 per day is a good start.

Clearly multiple-sensitivity is complex – as just these three last posts have shown! – and there are several mechanisms to rule in or out and then treat. I have worked very hard over the past few months to develop a testing and treatment approach, which will inevitably evolve more over time. If you need some help, start with an initial support chat and we will try, together, to work out what factors may be at play in yours and get your sensitivity levels down.

The first thing I would do, though, is get some information to work with – do a gut screen to test your SIgA, enzyme and SCFA/butyrate levels so you/we can start to see what may be going on. Those three are pretty easy fixes and could make a lot of difference on their own.

Hope that helps x