Douglas Kell is a systems biologist with a phenomenal new theory. He calls it “The Iron Dysregulation and Dormant Microbes hypothesis.” Everybody who in interested in chronic illness and inflammation, Lyme disease, ME/CFS, COVID/long COVID, and nutritional immunity needs to read his article. I’ve read it twice in the last couple days, but it’s extremely dense and will require many more attempts to digest the whole thing.
Over the past decade, my wife and I have been forced to develop our own, eccentric theory of chronic illness. Our theory includes a ton of different concepts from different researchers, practitioners, and from our own experiences, but we had not seen anybody else synthesize them together until reading the Kell paper.
He’s connecting the dots on a huge range of different conditions. As he says from the abstract: “These diseases include neurodegenerative (e.g. Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s), vascular (e.g. atherosclerosis, pre-eclampsia, type 2 diabetes) and autoimmune (e.g. rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis) diseases.”
The breadth and depth of the IDDM hypothesis is extremely impressive, and it accords with our own independent research. It’s not perfect or complete, but it’s superior to any other theory I’ve read, and it gives researchers/practitioners a thousand different testable hypotheses.
The article is long and extensively referenced. At the end, he summarizes it into seven main points. I’ll share six of them:
(1) A systems biology strategy was used to show that chronic, inflammatory diseases have many features in common besides simple inflammation.
(2) The physiological state of most microbes in nature is neither ‘alive’ (immediately culturable on media known to support their growth) nor ‘dead’ (incapable of such replication), but dormant.
(3) The inflammatory features of chronic diseases must have external causes, and we suggest that the chief external causes are (i) inoculation by microbes that become and remain dormant, largely because they lack the free iron necessary to replicate, and (ii) traumas that induce cell death and the consequent liberation of free iron; these together are sufficient to initiate replication of the microbes.
(4) This replication is accompanied by the production and shedding of potent inflammagens such as lipopolysaccharide or lipoteichoic acid, and this continuing release explains the presence of chronic, low-grade inflammation.
(5) Recent findings show that tiny amounts of these inflammagens can cause blood to clot into an amyloid form; such amyloid forms are also capable of inducing cell death and thereby exacerbating the release of iron.
(6) Additional to the formal literature that we have reviewed here, it seems to be commonly known that infection is in fact the proximal cause of death in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, etc. It may, for instance, be brought on by the trauma experienced following a fall. Such infections leading to death in chronically ill patients may involve the re-awakening of dormant bacteria rather than novel exogenous infection.
Every point deserves extensive elaboration.
If Kell is right, it’s a condemnation of the methods of modern medicine, which assumes “If I can’t culture it, it doesn’t exist.” If we live in a world where most microbes are dormant… the implications are staggering.
The connection between LPS, amyloid clots, and inflammation is also promising. It might give us a glimpse into the cyclical inflammatory patterns that so many practitioners describe—and it might explain why COVID’s spike protein was particularly nasty in triggering CFS.
Within this framework, widespread supplementation and fortification of food with inorganic iron might end up being the next public health scandal.