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New Research Confirms Martin Pall Hypothesis -
Pilot Study With Free-Radical Reducing Supplements Improves Treatment-Resistant CFS
Interview with Ingrid Franzon, N.M. M.S.c.
Introduction and Personal History
Ingrid Franzon, M.S.c., is a nutritionist at the Integrated Functional Medicine Clinic in Falun, Sweden. Together with colleagues Bo Jonsson, M.D., Ph.D., Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, and Peter Wilhelmsson, N.D., IFM Clinic in Falun, she conducted a pilot study on the use of four free-radical reducing food supplements to treat chronic fatigue syndrome. The four food supplements contained combinations of nutrients known to affect the free radical activity of nitric oxide and its metabolites. Nine patients were assessed before, during and after supplementation for eight weeks. (See Evaluation of Quality of Life, below). In this interview, Franzon discusses her own complete recovery from severe CFS as well as the improvements several of her patients experienced taking free-radical reducing supplements.
Focus: How long have you worked in nutritional medicine?
Franzon: For twenty-five years. I started working as a nutritionist in Zimbabwe, Africa where I worked at a farm and conference center for reconciliation run by Initiatives of Change. I ran the farm clinic, and we raised money to pay for the children to get a drink of nutritious, nutrient-dense sorghum every morning before they walked several miles to school. By the following winter all the stomach flus and colds I’d seen were a thing of the past. That was my life’s biggest a-ha experience and it set my course in nutritional medicine. The years in Africa probably contributed to my collapse with CFS as I did extensive dental work, and got complicated parasitic, fungal and viral infections while I was there. And it was through experiencing CFS that I learned even more about nutritional medicine.
Focus: How sick were you with CFS?
Franzon: For over a year I was so weak I could hardly walk fifty meters. I could only eat nine foods. At one point I would go weeks hardly eating at all, just drinking water. I was given medicine for parasites and lost twenty kilos. I was afraid that I’d be disabled for good, and because my mom has been sick a lot of her life I was afraid the same thing would happen to me. In fact, four generations of our family have had similar symptoms and my little granddaughter had severe chemical sensitivities at the mere age of two. I’ve had genetic testing done and I have polymorphisms that lead to poor detoxification and immune compromise. Therefore I have this incredible interest in healing CFS. There has to be a cure for CFS/MCS. I got well and I believe every single person who comes to see me in the clinic can get well. Several are well on the way to recovery. The key is reducing free radical levels in the body.
Focus: How did you get well?
Franzon: I went to many different practitioners. I was too sick to take supplements at that point. For six months I only tolerated physical therapies like acupressure and craniosacral therapy. One major breakthrough was discovering digestive enzymes. After the first six months I was able to eat more foods and take supplements.
Focus: So you are totally well today?
Franzon: I am healthy and live a normal and very active life. But if I get an infection, or have been flying on planes or stressed, I have to do something about it very quickly. I have had two relapses—once after caring for my father who died of a virus, and another time when I got a virus but had to complete a job and couldn’t rest and recover. After that relapse I got well pretty quickly taking free-radical reducing food supplements. Because they helped me so much I decided to conduct a small study on their effect in my patients.
Focus: How did they work?
Franzon: These food supplements reduced free radical levels. One of the most exciting cases was a woman who has tried everything to help her CFS for decades. She got sick in 1986 after an infection and has been ill for twenty years. She is constantly exhausted and has cognitive problems. When she is about to get very ill she says it feels as if a nightcap has come over her head and killed off everything in her brain. After only three days on these supplements she reported that she was sleeping better. At the end of two months she wrote me this on email:
“They have been a miracle cure for me. After 3 days supplementation I slept deeply through the night, felt better, and had more energy during the day than I’ve had for many years. My head and my thoughts cleared. I was so used to being “fuzzy” in my brain that I hadn’t even realized how confused I was. I was suddenly able to think things through and my ability to organize and take action returned, reminding me of what my life was like before. Even if I feel I still have a way to go before I can call myself well I now have a life – I only existed before. Only those who have been as limited and sick as I have been can understand how much these months when I took what I call my “energy pills” have meant to me. Thank you for letting me try, it has been a miracle!”
Another patient who has always told me she had a gut feeling she would never get well took part in the study and said she can now ride her horses again. She noticed a huge different when riding a bike as well; before she was in too much pain. She wrote that, “I particularly notice how I no longer need to stop when I come to the little hill that previously made my legs painful and more or less paralyzed.” She said the pain has a totally different quality and now only comes with extreme exertion.
Evaluation of Quality of Life in Persons with Chronic Fatigue
Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis Before and After Administration of Food Supplements Designed to Reduce Free Radical Activity.
By Ingrid Franzon, MSc, Bo Jonsson M.D., Ph.D., and Peter Wilhelmsson, N.D.
Many researchers have investigated effective treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), but Martin Pall, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry and Basic Medical Sciences at Washington State University, and author of Explaining "Unexplained Illnesses", is the first to suggest a plausible underlying cause and therapeutic method of treatment. Pall, who came down with a severe case of CFS in 1997 and fully recovered in 18 months, has dedicated the rest of his career to understanding and treating these illnesses.
Pall has discovered that abnormal levels of nitric oxide (NO), high levels of peroxynitrite (ONOO-) and superoxide activate the disabling and widely varying symptoms that characterize this entire group of unexplained illness. The fundamental approach: reducing NO-related free radical activity.
According to Pall’s theory, a known stressor initiates high levels of NO and ONOO-, most often a pathogen like a virus or bacteria, physical trauma, exposure to pesticides (including organophosphates and carbomates), solvents, or severe psychological stress. Other stressors can include exposure to biocides and organochlorine, parasitic infections like toxoplasmosis, poisoning from ciguatoxin, carbon monoxide or thimerosal. After the acute stressor, the body is unable to recover and continues to exist in a chronic state of elevated free-radicals.
This study evaluated nine patients with treatment-resistant CFS over a period of eight weeks. The Medical Outcomes Survey Short Form-36 (SF-36) was used. This is a well-validated psychometric instrument, and is one of the tools recommended in the measurement of the entire syndrome of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME) as it addresses physical and social activity, vitality, bodily pain, physical and mental states, and perception of general health. The multi-item scales are weighted, summed up, standardized and transformed to allow score indices: the Physical Component Score (PCS) and the Mental Component Score (MCS).
Four supplements containing multiple nutritional ingredients that have individually been shown to affect NO/ONOO- and superoxide activity were administered to a group of nine patients with CFS/ME for 8 weeks. The SF-36 was administered at the outset, after a month of supplementation and at the end of the supplementation period. When presented with the raw data on both physical and mental fatigue, Dr. Martin Pall did an inferential statistical analysis for significance, using a paired t-test where each patient’s results were analyzed at zero, four and eight weeks. The smaller a study, the more you want marked significance. Here, the results for physical symptoms were highly significant: the p value for the time period of 0-4 weeks was .006, nearly ten times stronger than p=.05, which is the minimum required for statistical significance. For 0-8 weeks the p value was .0149, and 0.482 for 4-8 weeks. Although these are also significant, the greatest improvement occurred in the first four weeks of the program, and though improvement continued to be statistically significant, it was not as dramatic. There were no significant results on mental symptom tests; perhaps the tests used for mental symptoms were not particularly revealing. These strong findings on this small study present compelling evidence that Dr. Pall’s hypothesis and suggested nutrients designed to reduce NO/ONOO- and superoxide activity are very useful in CFS/ME.
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